Leadership & Cultures

I got a chance to read a paper about Guanxi and leadership in China. The chinese society they say is driven by the principles of "Guanxi". I was totally impressed and could relate to everything written in the paper because it's pretty close to the culture I grew up in. 

I had a brief discussion with my friend from Britain and it was pretty evident that "Guanxi" is a pretty difficult concept to comprehend in the west. Anyway, here is a brief brain dump of my thoughts after reading the paper.

================================================

What?

I have been living and working in Britain for the last three years whilst most of my upbringing has been in the collectivistic culture. In the recent past, I have some times found it difficult to understand actions and behaviors of people at my work place and have had some trouble trying to bring out my true character at work.

So what?

Prof. Ellen Langer says that "Behavior makes sense from the actor’s perspective". But what makes sense to one may sound completely unfair and unacceptable to another. Understanding motivations

and cultural background is very important to make sense of a person’s actions and behaviors  To share one example, a leader or a manager in one cultural context may be seen as a figure who would tend to the needs and feelings of a follower and expecting this behavior in a different culture can lead to misunderstanding and lack of trust. Increasing interaction with global teams spread across different cultures has increased the chances of conflict within teams and team members. Conflict of interest, conflict of goals is a common theme especially in matrix organizations.

Now what?

Examining some of my core beliefs about individual goals, team goals and working in teams has revealed a deeper influence from my cultural background. While cross-cultural interactions are difficult to manage, I realize that I have to consider my internal biases before evaluating people and situations. Henceforth, I intend to consider cultural background to understand expectations of different people in the team and harness the potential of the team to achieve organizational goals.

Mindful negativity

There is a concept called "Confirmation Bias", which means "a tendency of people to favour information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses" (Source: Wikipedia). Building strong preconceptions may somehow be related to this constant urge to judge people at every instance and build strong beliefs within us. The confirmation bias deep within probably takes over for every positive and negative vibe we get from people. Positive is probably still ok, but for every negative thought, I think there should be a pause, a consideration and then considered internalization. I''d love to give it a new name, I'll call it "Mindful Negativity" :P

Mindfullness

Here is something I had written a while ago about Mindfullness. Very interesting topic this, would love to spend more time learning and understanding, but unfortunately it will have to wait for a wee while

==================

"Most of our suffering-physiological and physical, national and international is the direct or indirect

effect of of mindlessness" says Prof. Ellen Langer in her talk about Mindfulness. I have to admit that

this sounded like a sweeping statement to me at first and I was skeptical about adopting it. But my

first attempt at practicing the mindfulness exercise revealed the deeper sense of mindfulness and

helped me resolve an issue at work.

I met a colleague in the cafeteria and for a brief moment I noticed a change in my behavior. I

stopped and asked my self what I was doing and why I was doing it. I knew at that moment that just

one irrelevant socially uncomfortable situation with that person in the past had led my subconscious

mind to build an unfriendly image of the person. The feeling of being at unease when that person

was around had occupied my mind and dictated my interaction with the person.

I started a normal conversation and talked myself out of the awkard situation. I believe that being

mindful, reflecting on the situation and being in the moment, took away the burden of behaving

differently and freed me from an uneasy feeling.

I always considered reflection as a separate activity, an activity that required me to set time aside.

But now I realize that constant reflection and being in the moment is the best way of reflection.

However, I find it hard to be mindful all the time and have had to remind myself to be mindful. I

some times feel I have to put in extra effort to be mindful, so it depends on my energy levels for the

day. I occasionally find it useful to do some mundane tasks mindfully, it helps me free my mind

briefly and focus on one thing.

References:

LANGER, E. 2011. ADC Future Summit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=YVAhbcWk1KA (Accessed on 9th

October 2012)

===================

Visuals

I'm "extremely" busy today, but couldney stop myself from posting this video here. Impressed by this video, please, watch till the end.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNLYi9dBVlk


P.S - For the uninitiated, the original song is here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb48crSw-1U


By the way, I'm posting it here so that one fine day, I mean really one fine day when I look back at my blogs, I'd want to be reminded that visual comm is a field I'd want to explore and spend time learning!

Release early, Release often

"Release Early, Release often and Listen to your customers" is a software product release philosophy that emphasizes that you release your product frequently and use the feedback from customers to enhance your product. This phrase was used in a paper by Eric Raymond in the paper "Cathedral and the Bazaar" in which he studies the evolution of Linux. Not sure if it was he who coined the term or if it always existed.


It's also called the train model or some thing of that sort. If a customer wanted a version of a product and could not take it, he could always take the next one without having to wait too long. There is a phrase to describe it, don't quite know what that is right now.

I have seen this philosophy being adopted very closely and the subsequent changes in the evolution of a product. Don't quite know who initiated it, but thumbs up to the guys. It's worked quite well I'd say, but of course it has it has it's cons.

My first assignment on strategy focused on this philosophy. In my paper, I've explored the advantages and disadvantages of moving to a frequent time paced cycle. Here is a quick summary of some of the concepts I explored in the essay.

1> Time pacing - Release as per the calender. Stick to fixed dates or months. For example: Release every quarter or release every year.

2> Release early = Increasing speed or increasing time to market

3> Cash flows - Release often to improve sales and hence improve your cash flows.

4> Pioneer-Follower -  Follow a competitor in a market but focus on introducing new features to lead the market. Build a quick prototype to follow a customer in the market. As a pioneer, introduce a new feature, get quick feedback and enhance to lead the market.

5>  Cost - Does speed increase or decrease cost of your product?

6> Economies of scale - The impact of speed on scale economies. For ex: Splitting a piece of work in to two releases to suit your release cycle may not make any sense!

7> Economies of scope - Lets say you manufactured paper and pen. Can you re-use Marketing/HR/Supply chain if you released both together at the same time??

8> Industry clock speed - What's the speed of product releases for that market. For example micro processors industry has a different clock speed compared to a web page.

9> Listen to your customer - Is your customer ok to upgrade if you have a slightly better version in 3 months? I don't know, but I'd be inclined to say no. Who would want the hassle of upgrading for some small changes and re-learn the product and discover more bugs!! Might as well wait for something substantial.

The last point was my conclusion and recommendation to the business as well. Listen to the customer and decrease speed. I promise to expand and write a little more on my understanding of these concepts in future blog posts.

The mass market

What you see in the image above is the graph of the theory of diffusion of innovation. Each one us would fall into each of those categories at various points. For now, I'll restrict it to some thing we all now... the smart phones for example.

I was probably in the early majority (34%) when I bought the Samsung galaxy S3 and went back again to the early majority when I realized that I really needed an Iphone!! Anyway, this graph is more or less relevant to all businesses. The tipping point is the point when a technology, a product or an idea moves from a small market to a mass market (34%+34% market share).

Smart apps is one market where I've seen this mass market adoption battle lately. I have been downloading new apps for my phone and there are tons of them in the market. There is at least one free app for everything that I need. I have so many apps on my phone now that I need an app to manage all my apps and remind me to use those apps!!

Anyway, I some how don't feel very good about the smart apps market. The competition is very high and I some times wonder if the return on investment is any good at all. I read a comment some where from a developer who was comparing app prices with coffee prices. People are not willing to even pay the price of a take away coffee for an app!! Phew, tough market. Probably worth it if you want an additional small source of income, but I don't think it's worth the effort.