Investor meet

Learn to be able to read things, plan them in your mind and bring out details which might later affect business.

Focus on few things and with full attention.

Take a stand, on the spot think how things might break or become better.

Strategy formulation exercise at work

Today we conducted the strategy formulation exercise at work for the coming half year. Following is what we did step by step:

Step 1: To make the process more inclusive we first started with asking each department to share their SWOT analysis. So each team send a SWOT analysis of their team

Step 2: Now we tried to understand the focus area of the company then by sitting with the founders and deciding the focus areas for the next 6 months.

Step 3: Once we had done that, we mapped the SWOT analysis of each team under the focus area.

Step4: Now to decide which ones to pick and which ones to Ignore.

For doing Step 2, we tried another approach to arrive at vision/action for the teams.
First was to find the current and desired state for the company and categorize it between Core, Delight and competitive advantage. Post that we did a SWOT of the current and future core to understand if we are on the right track or not. Having done that then we drive Actionable items from this.

Training function at Startup

 Yesterday, I was part of an excellent session regarding corporate training.
The trainer had excellent energy and enthusiasm about the things he was talking about. So following are some of the takeaways on how training helps build an organization:

1. Training has to be done for all levels and regularly.
2. Training as a team is as important or rather more important in setting up the processes
3. Training acts as a parallel team to operations and sales wherein they modify processes, train teams on new products and keep monitoring closely the operations
4. Trainers have stringent KRAs basically around quality
5. The line manager is only concerned about numbers and conversion, but how good the new team member is performing is a function of how well he has been trained.
6. Trainer supersedes the roles of an HR in terms of conducting the test for the team members and asserting if the person is eligible for going to the next level or should be promoted
7. Trainers understand/become the expert on the process themselves first and then they build training module for the org.

Process definition has to be simple, crisp and very specific. There should be no room for subjectivity.

Building a balanced scorecard

Last week, I was part of the balanced scorecard exercise conducted at my workplace. Since it is a startup so this was the first time such exercise was being done. Here is how the process worked out and things I could grasp:

1. Balanced scorecard had 4 broad heading. - Finance, Process, Customers, Learning
2. Define KRAs [Broad goals in words], Metric [how to measure the progress on those goals], Targets [actual targets].
3. Work with the CEO and define KRAs under each of these broad heading and respective metrics and targets. These KRA are overall company priorities for the year.
4.  Now, based on these, understand which other teams in the company will support in achieving each overall company KRA. This way, organizational priorities can trickle down to each team in the company.

We did the exercise till here now, it took us approximately 4 hrs for this work. From here we hope to do this (expected time = 20 hrs):

1. Identify all the teams in the company.
2. See which company goals do these teams contribute to. Apart from this, there will be some others and deeper goals each team will pursue.
3. Assign targets and % weights for each of these.
4. After teams, in a similar manner, this will drill down to each person in the organization.

S returns learnings

Be strong n determined

Don't be scared of people or things

Be a beacon of hope

How does he inspire his team n his team follows him blindfolded?

- by taking a stand that is moral

- batting for his team mates

- very clear policy n decision making

- everybody knows the character

New Job learning

Learning following things at the new job:
- In a meeting always go with a viewpoint i.e. what you represent or want to get out of the meeting. Only then you will get anything out of the meeting

-  Learn to think on the spot and ask questions
- Actively contribute to the discussion, take queues
- Dont just sit and smile sheepishly

Dhirubhai Ambani quotes

1. If you don’t build your dream, someone else will hire you to help them build theirs.
2. Think big, think fast, think ahead. Ideas are no one’s monopoly.
3. If you’re born poor it’s not your fault but if you die poor it’s your fault.
4. Our dreams have to be bigger. Our ambitions higher. Our commitment deeper. And our efforts greater.
5. Only when you dream it you can do it.

If you don’t build your dream, someone else will hire you to help them build theirs. ... read more on yourstory.com

If you don’t build your dream, someone else will hire you to help them build theirs. ... read more on yourstory.com