Business Leadership

Lack of true leadership in today's corporate world is alarming. To be a successful business leader one needs to be tough, yet personal and one should play by pure instinct. Knowing when to let go shall be a pure gut decision, thus consistency becomes a requirement. Protecting your teritory is just not enough, and one needs to see the bigger picture and create consistancy of purpose. Boundaryless as Jack Welch describes would knock down external walls making suppliers and customers part of a single process. Rotten heads to give way to savvy business thinking that fosters an energizing environment where innovation thrives and creativity prevails. This is how everone wins and business runs successfully. Energise, innovate and empower, and be the true leader.

Operational Excellence

These are tough days, and the CEO's and senior leaders of organizations are tasked with cutting costs. Unfortunately they look at the easiest way of doing it. Layoffs. Its sad that people of such experience and calibre look to the easist way of accomplishing a task, thereby ignoring the most efficient way of doing the same thing. Operations excellence culminates to a steady state of operational efficiency that has optimised the performance of resources, services, functions, tasks and activities transforming an organization into a performing unit. Tools such as Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizan have helped achieve these goals. How many CEO's endorse these tools for excellence. Very little. Reducing and eliminating waste in the value chain alone significantly reduces cost, and improves efficiencies. Following a deciplined method such as the above and implementing it in a methodically alone will surfice in this transformation. Senior managers need to be trained and re-trained in these concepts and methods so that they can re-enforce them at all times. Many fail to realise that process improvements can be achieved by even having the simpliest of management and operational dashboards which shows the trends of key performance indicators over a period of time. This enables the managment to take corrective action to the indicators with a declining trend. Do will still need layoffs to cut cost?

Are we looking back....

After a few days of burning sunlight, the sun is behind the clouds today, with a gentle drizzel of rain too that does not stop me to add a note on the essential principle that we have to live by today. Quality, process and compliance were seen as the cornerstone of business excellence not long ago. Today, it's only cutting cost, layoffs, pinkslips and so on. Wake up regulatory authorities. What are all those so called companies that benchmark their performance to industry standards and regulations doing about keeping jobs intact. Remember Deming's theory of Chain Reaction...Improve quality ----> Decrease cost because of less re-work----> Thereby improving productivity------> thereby capturing market share with better quality and lower price ----> thereby staying in business -----> thereby provide jobs and more jobs. We have all forgoten Demings 14 points and 7 deadly sins. Time to wake up and take a re-look at this is vital to survive in today's gobal mealtdown days.

Leadership

Many of us would have heard the phrase "The Great Secret of Life is the Law of Attraction". A leader therefore attracts attention and has a lot of followers. Sadly, in today's corporate world we see more bosses and less Leaders. Bosses are not to be blamed in many cases as they are given targets that needs to be achieved within unrealistic timelines. So how do these bosses transform themselves into global leaders. Its a debate that goes on, and few have answers.
A thought for today's Leaders
“It is the combination of thought and love which forms the irresistible
force of the law of attraction.” - Charles Haanel (1866-1949)

Regulatory Compliance

Sarbanes-Oxley is the buzzword today....more and more enterprises are keen to be in compliance with this Act. In simple words SOX is all about definition, documentation, implementation and assessment of effective internal controls. Its also about prompt reporting of material events, which may effect the financial performance of the firm.

Compliance to this Act has lead organizations to streamline their Governance process. Section 404 of SOX promotes good organizational governance procedures. Section 302 needs the CEO and CFO to disclose whether there were any significant changes in the firm's internal controls within 90 days of the financial reporting filings.

So how does it all help and organization:
1. It helps educate employees
2. Helps to monitor and audit policy compliance
3. It changes the behaviour of trusted employees to prevent accidental disclosures
4. It helps identity and fix poor business processes that unnecessarily expose to sensitive data,
5. It prevents costly and embarrassing compliance incidents.

Have a good day.

Process Change

It's been a bright Tuesday morning. Having taken a break from work the last 5 days had been refreshing as I could reflect on many things that I had desired to do. Having been in the field of Software Process I have been thinking to lending a helping hand to those who desired to know more on establishing a process in their organizations whatever field they maybe in. Being a change agent over the last 10 to 12 years in my life and having seen orgnizations across the globe trying to implement a solution for a business problem has given me great insight on what today's organizataion what in terms of business benefit.

I grew up with the belief that every problem has multiple solutions, and the only challenge is identifying the right solution at a given circumstance at a given point in time. Solutions are usually simple than what we really imagine them to be. More often we can apply simple solutions to even our most demanding personal problems that we may encounter in our daily lives.

Here i am ready to give ideas to anyone who seeks one. Do get in touch with me at vasanthan@myway.com in case you need a quick-fix. You may also visit my profile at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/3/703/030 or http://www.ecademy.com/user/vasanthanphilip

Sharing experiences and reaching out to people has been enriching as it also helps to get to know more and more people in every city or country. Let your motto for the year be "A fiend in every city".

Share your thoughts, and let me know if you need anything from me.

Have a great day.