Write to me

Managers/Leaders/Executives often ask themselves: How do I build trust with my team. How to open floodgates of communications? How to tell team members to open up  so as to seek real feedback? How to create an environment of openness?


Writing, personally, to your team once a week (or once in 2 weeks) is the mantra that can make things happen. It can be sort of blog but you send that in a mail to your team, directly to their inbox. When Leader writes to me directly apprising me of the plans, happenings, learning, successes, failures, i feel special. I feel being valued. I feel that am worthy in hierarchy and not just a  cog. I will appreciate that you took time to write to me.


Make this writing subtle professional with a touch of team warmth. Write some informal stuff at the end to give it a personal touch and not just any newsletter.


Benefits to this practice:
- It kills rumors. I strongly feels that ‘Rumors are failure of leadership’. People usually get information through various informal channels but when a leader substantiates/discard/reason the rumours/happenings then it breeds faith and kill future gossips.
- It gives a sense of reassurance  to people at ground level, at all levels, to your team.
- It creates openness. People will write more to you giving you right ideas/feedback/opinions.
- It gives people a chance to confide in you. It open direct channel, kills hierarchy.
- It pushes your middle management layer to be more open, deliver more and keep promises. 


Whether you are doing good, or its just business as usual or you are in some unruly crisis, write to me.

PS: While i was working for British Telecom, Mark use to write to entire team every week and i just loved the concept. Thanks Mark.

Certainly, It's Love

Sometimes something seems so interesting, enchanting, riveting that you feel that you are in love with that thing. But then due to certain circumstances you move on. Then you wonder was that really Love? What do I really love? What are the things that are just a fad, what are the things that I do/did for the heck of it, what are the things that are just chance occurrence? How do I differentiate them from my real passion or real Love?

Then, one fine day, that thing comes back to you (Or you go back to it). That time you realize that you didn’t really move from that thing. It just got subdued in flux of other things in life (or mundane routine). This time, again, you can claim that its mere reemergence of infatuation with that thing. But your real Love will happen to you again and again, then again. It will keep calling you back.


If you feel that you are in love with some Business idea and really want to execute it, give it sometime to settle down. Till then toy with some other idea/thing. If that idea is your real calling, you will go back to it and you'll implement it. Here am not preaching procrastination in the garb of finding love. If you find your Love first time itself its just stupendous. But it's certain, if you come back to something you have far more conviction than the first time and you develop unflinching faith in your idea by this.
Once you realize you love something just stick to it. Don’t dally. Don’t leave it again. If you let it go, you will come back to it for sure but you would have lost some of the most beautiful time by then.
You can extrapolate this for human beings as well. It’s all the same.

Find your calling.


Image: wordle

My tuppence for Google Finance and Google AdSense

I was just submerged into my weekly dose of new info on my portfolio of stocks on Goggle Finance when I noted a few things:

1. When I am watching trend or reading info on my airlines stocks Google AdSense is displaying advertisement of online travel ticket portal. Obviously if someone is interested in airlines stock that doesn’t mean that he is interested in traveling. This space can be use for more effective Ads.

2. When I am on Portfolio-related news page, Google finance shows me my portfolio stocks by their stock exchange numbers (like 530073) and not stock names (like xyz Ltd). This is not user friendly. I can’t map any company news to action on that company’s stock as they are just numbers and like many other mortals am bad at remembering so many 6 digits company stock exchange numbers. If I have some news about company xyz then I have to go to my portfolio and check what happened to company xyz stock post that news. Instead on these vanilla numbers Google should display company names here.

3. The info displayed on Portfolio-related news page is redundant. ‘Recent quotes’ and ‘my portfolio’ section is showing same quotes as I just visited my portfolio. As people generally focus on their portfolio only, the info shown in these 2 sections will nearly always be redundant. Of-course Google can check if info for both these sections is same it can eliminate info from ‘Recent quotes’ section and use that space for something more fruitful, may be some more space for one more ad.

Am sure that Google folks are intelligent enough to mine web for feedback\ideas related to their products and soon they will give consideration to my tuppence as well.