Be Zero

If someone asks what one change you want in life, I am sure 90% of the people will ask for a “Restart” button in life. The question pops in my head “Why? Why some really doing great or at least looks like they are doing great people want to restart their lives?” The only answer is “Expectation. Expectation kills.”  

They say to reach on top is really tough but to retain that position is tougher. This is very true in our day to day lives. We have created our images in front of the world or rather false image many a time of smart, successful, intelligent, well-educated etc. all the possible adjectives which can be used to define all the super heroes. This image prevents us from taking risk or from making mistakes, because expectations form this imaginary person is very high; he can’t afford to make any mistake. As Albert Einstein has rightly said if you can’t make mistakes you can’t invent.

When someone ask Steve Jobs what is the best thing happen to you in your professional career. He said “I got fired from my own company Apple was the best thing happened to me. That burden of successful career had replaced my freedom of creativity and I started Pixar.”

What one should do to be free from everything and do what he wants in life? “Become Zero”. Tell the world that you are good for nothing, that don’t keep any expectations on you and you are not going to save thins world like some super hero. Rajput kings in their time whenever see that they are not going to win the war, they used to do “Kesariya”. In Kesariya they go to fight the war as they are doing to die and just want to die as a brave solider. Sometimes it had done the wonders like turning the tables. What made it possible? The killed the expectation of victory and they won.

To set yourself free “Be Zero”.

Reinventing the Wheel

Reinventing the Wheel

“Don’t reinvent the wheel; if you calculate ‘1+1’ 10 thousand times also you will not get the different answer, so just take the ppts  (Power Points Slides) from knowledge exchange and finish the job. We have better things to do.” This was my first lesson while working in consulting space on my very first consulting project. The irony was our department was supposed to work on innovation and process excellence in our domain!!!

This was I guess common story 95% of the IT companies in India (in rest of the 5%, people are not frustrate enough to tell the truth, so just give those poor chaps some time). I think we are still a young or developing country in term of getting really critical job. I hope that time will come soon. But today I am want to see this common phrase which is used like “thank you” and “sorry” in day to day corporate vocabulary.

To start with think about this if some mathematician had not recalculated or had not seen “1+1” from different perspective then still we wouldn’t have binary system and in turn computer revolution. There are many reasons for such short sited behavior.

First of all we always forget that situations of life are not “black / white”, there is a whole spectrum. And this spectrum is so vast that to give a generic or universal wisdom for entire spectrum is nearly impossible. One will always find a counter situation for any given situation where wisdom becomes foolishness. The real problem occurs when the situation given and counter situation for that situation are very near to each other on the spectrum. For example

Secondly, wherever we think about “Innovation” we always look for “Eureka”. In my opinion there are three types of innovation 1) Core Innovation 2) Application Innovation and 3) Process Innovation.

1)      Core Innovation: This type of innovations is called invention. It is a real deal, “Eureka” types of things. This type of innovations are really a fundamental and open up a totally new horizons i.e. invention of aero-plane, space-shuttle, electricity etc.

2)      Application Innovation: This innovation is the innovation in the application of technology or tool in hand. For example SMS (short message service) is now become a synonym for message sent from mobile phones. This intension of such messaging service was to convey short message but it has become a huge chatting tool in India. People especially youngster / teenagers are using SMS for chatting with friends and the implication is so huge that mobile service provided are coming up with various packages and relaying on them to increase or retain sales.

But here I want to talk about “Process Innovation” which is most of the time ignored and we come across word of “wisdom” such as “Don’t reinvent the wheel”. Actually such attitude is totally tangent to the attitude needed for “Process Innovation”. This type of innovation will not come up unless one try to reinvent the wheel meaning try to follow the same process and find out the flaws or more effective or more efficient steps to make that process better. That is called “Process Excellence”.

Following example will illustrate my stand point.

Invention of Assembly line: As we know in today’s manufacturing industry concept of assembly line is not unknown to any. This was not a one day job. It took years to make this manufacturing process excellent. Then and now the same things are manufactured or we can say same wheel is made but the by reinventing the wheel again and again we have innovated and perfected the process.

So crux of the story, “Reinvent the wheel, make your own mistakes”.