Last weekend i took my 1 year old daughter to swimming pool (was her first time at the pool). She was in the pool sitting in a floater. She started paddling her legs and flapping her arms with in no time. I was amazed seeing that. kids have such an inherent ability to adapt and learn, its just so opposite of us (adults). Above narration is a preamble to what i started thinking in the pool.
I work for a startup product company which is doing fairly well. We are at a stage where management wants to invest money in product development. Initially they were behind revenues, (this is the case with any startup, else they will go belly up) which has led the product to such chaos that its impossible to manage now. We had Product strategy meeting in Delhi last week to come up with a plan to make the product manageable. What i observed is listed below.
- Resistance to change: When i was trying to explain some of the aspects of agile, lot of them were skeptical, especially people on whom organization is dependent on. I was trying to convince them that distributed development can be done with less pains using some of the aspects of agile. Resistance was from people who are considered as extremely important in the organization today. Since i termed them as bottle necks they were offended but sincerely when i think, they are bottlenecks.
- Knowledge Transfer: Delhi office was started before bangalore office, naturally they have more domain knowledge than people in bangalore. Delhi public dont want to transfer knowledge, may be because they are scared of loosing their job. This is probably due to management not updating the people about organizational goal or people we have are so incompetent that they are scared of being laid off.
I was wondering looking at my daughter, why dont adults like us have what a 1 year old has?
1 comment:
Your daughter doesn't have the fear of falling. Your management has fear of failure. Risk taking capability is inversely proportional to fear of failure. Again fear of failure is inversely proportional to management's resilient capability. i.e. Risk taking capability is directly proportional to management's resilient capability. I used to joke that many companies are 'ready to loose success 10 times, but not to face failure even once’. That is not the kind of company to be with.
I noticed the same kind of behavior in different scenario. Manager’s responsibility is to manage the problems. But most of the managers know how to manage, when everything goes fine. I used to feel that they are doing something a void can do. Basically do nothing. They will never do something different. The moment something goes wrong, you can identify how much resilient they are to pull back the team & put everything on track. Probably that company also has this kind of managers, especially at the top level
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