The idea in brief: Leaders have to manage the past, present and future simultaneously. The three boxes represent these three orientations. In the book The Three Box Solution Vijay Govindrajan draws a parallel to the triumvirate of the Hindu faith – Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma. Vishnu is the god of preservation, Shiva is the god of destruction and Brahma is the god of creation. These represent the three roles of a leader.
I struggled to get used to the fountain pen. It used to leak and stain my shirt. On the days of exams, I was given a spare fountain pen in case I ran out of ink. I never had enough to write especially during exams and so that scenario remained a figment of my imagination. Ballpoint pens were not permitted. The teachers were divided in their opinion if our handwriting would deteriorate because of the use of ballpoint pens. Our Math teacher didn’t care what pen I used as long as I got the arithmetic correct. The English teacher would penalize us if we did not use fountain pens. We all knew that those who had better handwriting scored just that little bit more because of their penmanship.
Superbosses seem to be able to spot talent and hire them with unconventional means. They seem to see what the person is capable of doing even when the person does not seem to know how to do it right at that moment. They look beyond conventional resumes and qualifications to look at the ability to learn. Once hired the Superbosses have their own method of transferring knowledge and wisdom. Not just know-how they seem to pass on a way of thinking and a way of life. Even as they are doing that they seem to leave room for the protégé to develop their own style. To achieve this, they will often bend the job to leverage the strengths of the new hire or help the person overcome a developmental gap.
Entrepreneurs are those people whose dreams are larger than their resources. We watch them talk about their ideas in the pages of magazines. They seem to have the ability to find opportunities out of thin air. Some of them are college dropouts. Many quit jobs in dream companies to chase their own dreams. Even when they talk about their failures, there is a magical manner in which each failure seemed to nudge them towards their success.
I have heard of many people who use only their gut to evaluate a candidate. Remember by tossing a coin to make a hiring decision, there is fifty percent chance of the candidate being very successful - statistically speaking. By studying the successful hires made by the C-Suite of a top organization they were horrified to discover that their successful hiring record was far below the coin toss method. How did this happen? They had never tracked the leaders' skills in interviewing. Leaders were using their own heuristics to choose candidates. When the new hire turned out to be a poor performer, they blamed the candidate and never for a minute stopped to think that the decision to hire that person was theirs.
In India we often refer to a confidence trickster or a con as a "420". The term “420” comes from a reference to Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code is used in India to refer to a confidence trickster. Even in neighboring Myanmar, term 420 persists in popular culture to this date. Psychologist and writer for NewYorker.com, Maria Konnikova has put together a great read on how the cons operate and more importantly, what makes us fall for these cons? Have you ever been tricked? I have. But have you tricked anyone?
Traditionally, organizations have worked based on one rule that every employee of the organization had to follow. Then came the era of five or six sets of rules that applied to five or six types of employment contracts that were offered by an organization. What if each individual employee had their own unique contract based on all the possible variables they could choose from. Today, several startups and digital disruptors have very few employees. For example, Uber has a policy of having only 3 employees in a city who manage the entire operation from partnering with drivers and managing them and serving clients. Xiaomi sold a million handsets in in India with only 75 employees. Will these organizations create new models of performance management and rewards? Will they grow their own talent by hacking new ways of learning at a rapid pace or will they buy out talent on a pay per use model? The possibilities are immense. Here are six roles your organization should think about.
The one who left the strongest impression on me was Abhinav Bindra who was there to talk about autobiography A Shot at History. Abhinav comes through as “unflappable” almost to the point of being cold and unemotional, but in a very positive way. He seemed to go through this adulation with a somewhat detached view. Look at it like this, he won the gold in the 10 m Air Rifle event at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, and became the first Indian to win an individual gold medal at the Olympic Games. It has been eight years since then. Could it be that we don’t win enough medals because we celebrate our victories for too long. It is true that the 6 ounces of gold that Abhinav’s medal had lifted the entire nation’s self-worth. Maybe we should celebrate the moment of victory without lingering on it and then shift our focus towards the next Olympics.
