Skip to main content

Sindhu Effect

Certain events have an effect on the psyche of a country or a place or even a company. 17 million people watched PV Sindhu fight Carolina Marin for the Olympic Gold in badminton. Sindhu may have lost gold, but she won a billion hearts.

And all around us today - we see children play badminton - atleast in Bangalore everywhere. This is a moment to cherish - as children grow up they will be inspired by this moment. And I hope that India becomes a force to reckon with in badminton.

For our generation, India winning the Cricket World Cup in 1983 was a huge inspiration. I am sure, many of us have such moments to inspire ourselves.

Many companies have moments they cherish and replay and revisit as part of inspiring their teams. True, as a company one cannot have such moments every quarter to inspire the workforce - but what if they used one such great moment to pivot themselves into a different orbit. What if such a moment energised the workforce, generated learning opportunities? 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...

Waigaya and Sangen Shugi - Honda

Two big takeaways from Driving Honda were Waigaya and Sangen Shugi. A few days ago, we were working on a strategy module for a company. As we leafed through old and new theories and books around the same - one comment which caught my eye was Henry Mintzbergs comment where he says "Strategy is like weeds, it has to grow all around your company" A lot of times organisations dip into their pool of employees (and sometimes customers) and solicit ideas from them. This happens either at an offsite or a meeting or some quarterly review and the ideas pile up. Most companies today have an innovation program that encourages bottom up ideation. Many of these ideas are future strategy - provided someone is listening. Sometimes these ideas are not immediately implementable - but if one keeps looking, there might be valuable stuff in there. And if (post such programs) ideas die very often, the motivation of someone to keep doing it will also diminish. Waigaya is what Honda call