The Habit of Winning

by Prakash Iyer

  When I see young, ambitious people, I sometimes worry that they are quick to copy the mannerisms and styles and looks of their more successful role models—but don’t spend as much time on developing the core: the real values that make for real success. They confuse the visible trappings of success with the real internal strengths that contribute to the success.

  It probably says something about the world we live in that while we spend more on beauty treatments and clothes and cosmetics, we are reluctant to spend much on training ourselves, on opening our minds, on becoming better human beings. Young people often complain that the company is not spending enough on training them. They wait for the company to spend on their education. Yes, they pay for their own clothes, for that cool pair of sunglasses, for that monthly visit to the beauty salon. But training? ‘That’s not my responsibility’ seems to be the refrain. Clearly, appearances seem to matter more to us than our core expertise and strengths.

  I’m reminded here of the story of a balloon-seller at a village fair. Just the kind of fair made famous by Bollywood as the place where twin brothers get separated at the start of the movie, only to be reunited twenty years and sixteen reels later. Well, this balloon-seller was selling helium-filled balloons in various colours—red, blue, white, green, yellow …

  The string of a red balloon snapped by accident and, as the balloon soared into the sky, the crowd roared and kids tugged at their parents’ arms, urging them to get them balloons. Seeing that it was attracting attention, the balloon-seller released another balloon. This time, a blue one, that quickly soared towards the clouds. Soon after, he released a green balloon. Then a yellow one.

  Seeing all the balloons going up, a little boy went up to the balloon-seller and innocently asked: ‘If you release that white balloon, will it also soar as high as the rest?’ The balloon-seller explained: ‘Son, it’s not the colour of the balloon that matters. It’s what’s inside that makes it rise!’

  True of balloons. True of people too. Appearances don’t matter. It’s what is within that makes the difference. That’s a lesson we would all do well to remember. When we look at other people. And when we look at ourselves. Look deeper. Look within.

  It isn’t the colour of the balloon that matters. It’s what is inside it that makes it rise!

  The Frog and the Scorpion

  ‘I never thought he’d do this to me, not after all that I did for him!’

  You must have heard this line before. Or perhaps, said it yourself. The sense of betrayal, of being let down, is gut-wrenching. And yet, it seems to recur with unfailing regularity. In offices. In relationships. In lives.

  The sense of hurt seems to get compounded by the belief that we did so much for that person. The notion is that since we’ve done so much—for that boss, that colleague, that friend—we’ve bought out his right to do something that would hurt us.

  A friend of mine went to work as the CEO of a business that had been built by a self-made man—a terrific entrepreneur notorious for his whiplash tongue, his short temper and his interfering nature. Well-meaning friends warned the CEO-designate about the challenges and risks a professional manager would face in working with such a promoter. But my friend believed that the promoter needed him—a professional—desperately and would, therefore, change his ways to ensure the CEO’s survival. ‘We’ve talked about it,’ he said to his friends, ‘and the promoter has promised me that there will be complete respect, and absolutely no interference.’ Twelve months later, the CEO was gone. Reason? Yes, you got it. Whiplash tongue, short temper, interference.

  Have you heard the story of the scorpion and the frog? Seems the scorpion wanted to cross the stream but since he couldn’t swim, he went over to the frog and said, ‘Why don’t you let me ride on your back? I can’t swim!’

  ‘I can’t possibly let you do that!’ said the frog. ‘You are a scorpion. You will sting me!’

  ‘Oh, you stupid frog!’ said the scorpion. ‘I couldn’t possibly do that because if I did, we would both drown!’

  Sensing the logic, and seeing an opportunity to win bragging rights for having helped a scorpion across the water, the frog agreed. Well, when they were in the middle of the stream, the scorpion stung the frog. ‘Why did you do that?’ asked the frog, shocked, and quickly going down in the water. ‘Because I am a scorpion!’ came the reply, as both the frog and the scorpion drowned.

  Good thing to remember. Just because you do a good deed to a scorpion, it doesn’t mean that it will stop him from stinging you.

  Scorpions are scorpions. They sting. Expecting otherwise will set you up for disappointment. Time and again.

  Scorpions will be scorpions. They will sting.

  Eat That Frog!

  Given that perhaps the only thing that Mukesh Ambani and Bill Gates and you and I have in equal measure is the number of hours in our day, it probably makes sense for us to figure out how to manage time better! Time management is, not surprisingly, high on everyone’s list of things to get better at.

  One of the habits often recommended—and something that I have found useful too—is making a to-do list. It’s a practice that has worked for me. I make a list of things to do, then go about striking them off as I accomplish them. And here’s a little trick I have often used in the past to feel good: I throw in a few not-so-important but easy-to-finish tasks on the list. And then start to feel really good as I strike them off. Do you find yourself doing that too, and feeling suitably busy?

  Here then is a piece of advice that could dramatically improve your productivity. It’s powerful. And it’s the title of a book by the self-help author Brian Tracy—Eat That Frog!

  There’s an old saying that if you woke up each morning and ate a live frog, you could probably spend the rest of the day content in the knowledge that nothing worse could happen. Think about that!

  Now think of a frog as your most important task, your number one priority, the one most likely to make the greatest impact. Because it’s a tough act, we keep pushing it away, hoping that perhaps it will go away on its own. It doesn’t. Often, the most important task is also the toughest. It pays to get over it—first! Eat that frog, be done with it and the rest seems so easy then.

  It stands to reason that if you have to eat that frog, it won’t help to keep it in front of you and stare at it all day long. Yet, that’s exactly what we tend to do. We keep that one big task, that big-impact tough call, hanging over our heads, which only increases our stress levels. We keep staring at the frog. We keep thinking of how ugly it is. We worry about the awful taste. And we hope that all of this will make the frog more palatable. Or better still, we hope the frog will go away. However, nothing changes. Your most important task remains to be done. The frog still needs to be eaten. Go ahead, serve yourself.

  And yes, here’s another tip. If you have to eat two frogs, eat the bigger, uglier one first. Prioritize. Make sure you do the more important task first.

  The eat-that-frog philosophy is, ultimately, not just about managing time. It’s perhaps good advice for managing life. In relationships and at work, it pays to grab the bull by its horns, forget the trivial bits and focus on the big-ticket items. They make the biggest difference. Talking about them, bitching, worrying, procrastinating, constantly looking at them—all these won’t help at all. The benefit you would have gained from accomplishing your biggest task will remain elusive, and stress and worry levels will only mount.

  Take the first step. Identify your frog. Your big task. Your big-impact action step. Your number one priority. Once you’ve done that, go ahead—eat that frog.

  And taste the difference!

  If you have to eat that frog, it doesn’t help to stare at it all day long.

  Making a Difference,

  the Starfish Way

  In a memo to all company employees, a memo that found its way into the media, Infosys CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan urged each employee to save ten dollars. ‘If each of us saves just ten dollars, the cumulative amount would be
a million dollars!’ he wrote. Sage advice that. Good for Infosys, good for any organization.

  In a large company, it’s tempting for an individual employee to see large spends all around him and wonder: ‘What difference will my ten dollars make?’ The cumulative effect, the real impact, is often hard to perceive. And that keeps us from taking that first step. Keeps us from saving the ten dollars we easily can.

  It’s like that with our rants against our elected political leaders too. We are angry with the leadership. We seek change. And yet, when election time comes around, we don’t bother to vote. ‘After all,’ we argue, ‘what difference does one vote make?’ And so it goes on.

  We don’t bother too much about throwing litter from our cars on to the streets either. ‘The city is so dirty. What difference will another empty packet of chips make?’ And we don’t bother writing that small cheque that could help educate a poor girl child somewhere. After all, illiteracy is a huge problem in India. Paying to educate one child won’t alter the numbers, will it?

  It’s like that at work too. We see a big problem and, fazed by its enormity, we stop taking those small baby steps towards solving it.

  At Pepsi, for instance, one of the challenges was to get glass-fronted Pepsi refrigerators in retail outlets to be pure—stocked only with Pepsi’s range of soft drinks. (No Coke please, Pepsi is paying for the fridge!) Well, retailers across the country were inclined to use the refrigerators they received from any soft drink company to cool everything they stocked—competing soft drinks, water, lassi, even paneer! Imagine trying to remove all that stuff from millions of coolers across outlets, across the country. It was a daunting task, seemingly hopeless. But the message to the sales team was clear: When you visit an outlet, don’t leave until you’ve made the Pepsi cooler pure. As salespeople questioned what difference one cooler would make in a country full of impure coolers, this story came in handy. The tale of the woman and the starfish.

  An old man, walking on a beach one morning, noticed a young woman walking ahead of him. As she walked, she would bend down every now and then, picking up starfish and throwing them back into the sea. Catching up with the woman, he asked her why she was doing this. She replied that the poor starfish had got washed ashore at night, and would probably die in the morning sun.

  ‘But this beach stretches for miles and there are probably a million starfish on the shore,’ countered the old man. ‘How will your effort make any difference?’ The young woman looked at the starfish in her hand, flung it into the water and said, ‘Well, it sure made a difference to that one.’

  In our lives and careers, we regularly come across such starfish moments. Seemingly insurmountable problems. Where your individual contribution to the solution seems small, almost trivial. The next time that happens to you, your starfish moment, remember you could do one of two things. Either shrug your shoulders and say why bother, what difference can it make. Or take that small step and do your bit.

  The beach may be long. There may be millions of starfish. But throwing one back means one life saved. You can make a difference!

  Every little bit counts. Do your bit. Make a difference.

  How Good Are You with Bad News?

  Picture this. You are the CEO of a shipping company. Let’s call it White Star Line Shipping Company. You and your team have been working on building the world’s largest luxury passenger ship, with safety features that make it almost unsinkable. The world, including your shareholders and your board, is watching with bated breath, to see how the investment in this dream project will pay off.

  On the appointed day, your dear baby sets sail. As it nears the end of its maiden voyage, you get this business update from your line managers: ‘700 happy passengers reached New York safe.’

  As performance reports go, that’s pretty darn accurate. But it doesn’t quite tell the whole story. It doesn’t tell you that this is the story of the Titanic. Your luxury liner just hit an iceberg, and 1517 people lost their lives. Only 706 survived, and just about made it to New York. Happy to be alive.

  The corporate world is full of stories of the ‘700 passengers reached New York’ kind. Given the pressures to perform, the quirky demands of quarterly earnings guidance, unforgiving boards and markets and, of course, fat bonuses tied in to results delivery, bad news is not only slow to come, it’s often suppressed. Hidden and buried.

  We either find newer metrics to report (‘volume sales are lower, but in value terms we’ve grown’) or we report anecdotal evidence (‘who says people prefer our competitors’ products? I have this email from a customer who raves about us’) or we conveniently brush the past under the carpet of a rational excuse, and paint a rosy, dramatically different future (‘we are down 30 per cent versus plan but with the monsoon behind us, we should be able to get to our targets for the year’)…

  It’s not just the sales and marketing guys who succumb to the temptation of delaying the bad news. CEOs and boards are guilty too. Remember Bear Stearns, the iconic US investment bank that collapsed in 2008? On Monday, 10 March, the CEO Alan Schwartz was quoted as saying, ‘Bear Stearns’s balance sheet, liquidity and capital remain strong!’ And by Sunday 16 March, the bank was dead and gone. As subsequent events on Wall Street have confirmed, the distance between a blue-chip investment bank and bankruptcy has now shrunk to just a weekend. Friday’s hero is Monday’s basket case. Why didn’t the CEOs of the errant banks sound the warning bells earlier? Why do sales managers delay bad news? Why do managers look to report imaginary silver linings in the face of otherwise gloomy, dark clouds?

  The answer lies in our ability (or should that be inability?) to manage bad news—both in terms of delivering it and receiving it.

  It has been well documented that for success in the corporate world, what managers need is not just a high IQ (intelligence quotient) but also a high EQ (emotional quotient). I’d like to add a new rider: The difference between good managers and truly great ones lies in their BNQ. Bad News Quotient. The ability to manage bad news. Both in terms of delivering it, and taking it in.

  Senior managements and boards need to ensure that they create an environment where they get the bad news first. If you scream and shout when you hear the bad news, it’s unlikely you’ll get to hear very much more in the future. (A dear friend once recounted how her seventeen-year-old son, a sophomore in a prestigious American college, told her about his newly acquired blonde American girlfriend. As a mom, she was instantly nervous, disappointed, even angry but concealed her uneasiness and didn’t say a word. ‘I knew,’ she said to me over lunch, ‘that if I showed my displeasure, that would be the last time he’d tell me anything.’)

  It’s fashionable, but grossly inadequate, to merely say: ‘Give me the bad news first.’ What matters is how you react thereafter. Often, too often, external pressures get cited and the bad news is wished away, the good news forcibly willed in. (‘I am going to have none of it. Do whatever it takes, but you have to deliver the target profit.’)

  Similarly, when looking at dashboards and performance scorecards, it’s important to have an agreed set of metrics to measure consistently. Else, managers get encouraged—nay, emboldened—to pick the isolated positive metric to report. A handkerchief-sized bit of good news is used to cover an entire body of failure. Spelling forecast as H-O-P-E is not just bad spelling—it’s terrible business too!

  Getting the bad news early not only helps prepare everybody for the impending disaster but, if delivered right and acted upon, it could actually help avert the disaster itself.

  The next time you hear bad news and are ready to fly off the handle and demand that you want to hear none of it, pause. Check your own BNQ. How you receive the tiny bits of bad news determines whether the big bad news stories get delivered to you at all.

  The next time you need to report bad news, muster the courage to deliver it. Straight up. Think of your BNQ. Your ability to manage bad news is perhaps a terrific measure of how good a manager you are.

 
; That’s not all. Once you get to work on building a team and an organization that’s high on BNQ, you will find the culture spreads. Top to bottom. Chances are yours will be a more successful business, quickly reacting to the reality of the marketplace, making mid-course corrections, making the right moves. Fast.

  And if that’s not enough, you can be pretty sure too that in the unlikely event that your ship is sinking, you won’t have to hear about 700 passengers reaching safe.

  The difference between good managers and truly great managers lies in their BNQ, their Bad News Quotient. Their ability to manage bad news. Both in terms of delivering it, and receiving it.

  VIII

  WINNING WITH TEAMS

  Flat-tyre Leadership

  A friend of mine shared this wonderful story about Ratan N. Tata (RNT), the leader of the house of Tatas. The story may be apocryphal but it aptly sums up the genius of the man credited with transforming a somewhat sleepy giant into a global powerhouse. The man whose vision and dogged persistence brought the Nano to life.

  One of RNT’s first assignments was the stewardship of Nelco, the ailing electronics company in the Tata portfolio. The story goes that a team of Nelco’s senior managers was driving to Nasik along with RNT. Halfway through, the car had a flat tyre. As the driver pulled up, all the occupants—including RNT—got off for a comfort break, leaving the driver to change the tyre.

  Some of the managers welcomed the break; it allowed them the much-needed chance to light up cigarettes! Some used the opportunity to stretch, smile, share a joke. Then, one of them noticed that RNT was not to be seen, and wondered aloud where he might have vanished.