Day for buying vegetables. Two options exist – purchase from the truck which drives in to the building campus every alternate day or shop from the fresh produce store 50 metres away. The fresh produce store seems to have a better variety and no queues. The downside is a premium for some of the produce which seem to have risen due to shortfall in supplies. A kilogram of cucumbers for example cost Rs 100/- (1.5 USD).
The raw mangoes are useful for some pickle and the upcoming Tamil New year’s day festival.
The deal is done. An announcement from the customer is greeted with much relief by all parties. A strict cap on communication ensues and everyone maintains a steady silence on the outcome and saving the honors of communicating to the Boss. Drafting a note announcing the win with details of the effort and the people involved began. An 8 month pursuit takes a small building complex. Apart from recalling the names, mandatory to also recall the specific contribution; necessitated to avoid snide remarks later on. The ones who are left out are the ones who left the company during the course of the pursuit. 4 pages of details ultimately goes out as an attachment to an email rather than going in to the body of the email. How does one get the attention of the reader ?
Evening calls are becoming a drain on energies. 45 minutes is a barrier after which attention flags.
How to get people to solve their problems by themselves ? A culture of running to the boss to resolve issues of work assignment, priority assignment has to be uprooted. It is an antithesis to ‘collaboration’. What will it take for a team member to call another team member and plan regarding utilization of a shared resource ? How many are mature enough to do that ?Begun the process of withdrawing from such interventions by indicating explicitly via emails. What do you do when no one is watching ? Do you want someone always to watch over ? Ease the burden of reporting and elevate the level of engagement with the team. Each one is free to design the way they want to organize work for themselves.
The evening town hall call to report on business continuity passes of incident free ! Outcome is townhall with another business head. We have now become a presentation vomiting factory/deck churning factory ! Aghast at the number of presentations churned out and the dependence that a lot of people at leadership level have on associates to prepare material for them. No idea how it happens at various levels but this preparation is a mighty bandwidth guzzler.
Lunch involved a good amount of research by Mrs. This time it was a Dal Fry inspired from a recipe by Sanjeev Kapoor
Mrs. is busy attending numerous webinars organized by tour companies from Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Good learning on new destinations and how to pitch to customers.
The win mail hits every inbox that matters and the responses start coming in.
Journeysmatter 