Journey of Your Organisation from Good to Great

Why this Article is relevant?

First let us be very clear about the fact that every organization does not last forever, forget about forever, majority of them don’t even last longer than 10 years. Of course, there has to be something different with your organization in order to be journey itself from Good to Great, and when you focus on becoming Great, survival question gets automatically solved. We are here to analyze this subject in order to open our eyes towards long term thinking process that may positively affect longevity of your organization.

The article is about how your organization can travel the journey from Good to Great and what it takes to create Great organization. Possibly there are infinite ways in which you can do it, but who has time to do the thinking part? Who is putting an effort to think for progress of your organization? Everyone in the corporation is busy with something or the other. 12 hours a day in office and we feel we don’t have the time to think for progress of the organization. In this way, we can definitely be good, but not great.  

Let’s start analyzing the factors that plays a role in the functioning of your organization. Then we will move onto what really matters in the Growth and Greatness of the Organization.

First of all, let’s see what you have and what others have, what are the resources that are available to you but may or may not be available to other organization.

1.       Technology – I think, technology is available openly to anyone who can invest money into it. So, I guess that cannot be the factor which will differentiate you from others. Now, depending on my first reply, you will say, Money (See, I knew it you would say this). Next we are discussing it.

2.       Money/Capital – A serious topic worth spending time on. I just want to brief you about possibly what may be going on in today’s capital market. With the introduction of Alternate Investment Funds by SEBI, hitherto unregulated sector is now becoming regulated. So, it will become an attraction point for foreign investors and cautious investors to come into play. Private Equity, Angel Funds are in search of the ideas from super brains that they can tap, commercialize it, take stake and earn 10 to 15 times the initial investment account when the rewards starts flowing. (Remember the movie, Social Network? The rich friend sponsoring Mark Zuckerberg for making his idea go practical.) So, today the time is different than twenty years back when you would keep on begging from banks for loans in order to make your idea come into implementation stage. 

There are venture capitalist, high net worth Individuals who can pick anybody from slums with a brilliant idea and will make them a slumdog millionaire. Of course, in the process they themselves also earn millions.

My point is that money does not let you stand apart from the crowd.

3.       Talent: Here comes a debatable topic, human being comes into play. Let’s analyze this. Today, do you think, it is so tough to hire talented Brains. Perhaps no, because there is competition everywhere. Scholar students are in Queue for getting admissions in good engineering or commerce or MBA course. Every year, fresh talented job seekers come to market. People will join you as salaried employee because they need a home to stay and they need money to pay off their home loan EMI flashing in his/her bank statement every month. With this type of general scenario, you can hire talent at fairly reasonable costs.

We can go on discussing several other things that affects business but does not make impactful difference when it comes to organizational effectiveness and greatness.

Let’s try to find the answer as to how your company can travel from Good to Great.

I will try my best to give justice to the discovery but I request every reader to give their critical evaluation on the aspects being discussed. May be I will improve upon myself after reading your replies.

The Answers are found from lives of Great Leaders: The answers of Organizational effectiveness can be found from lives of great leaders who moved nations or created big corporations and changed the course of history, who tried to play their roles in Independence of their nation, who tried to bring about change in the society, the soldiers who fought exceptionally and created history, the individuals, scientists who gave their life for a particular research, and so on.

Let's discuss some aspects one by one. 

Who? Name of the Person	What? What he possessed?	How? What you can do in your organization to take it to new heights.
Narayan Murthy	Aim to build orphanage when he had nothing? What he possessed was concern for people and the willingness to work towards betterment of society.	Always have noble goals of organizations and not just physical. Always give due importance to Social Responsibility. It’s not the Companies Act, 2013 which should come and tell you that you should spend on CSR. It’s your duty. And believe me or not, it works wonders. Those human beings who encounters happiness because of your spending on CSR blesses you from the bottom of their heart and that unconsciously helps your business grow. Its law of Karma. It applies to human beings, it applies to corporations, it applies to nations also. There are many unknown things in this world that science cannot explain.
Narayan Murthy	When Ms. Sudha’s father asked him to get a good job in order to marry her, he refused saying he will not do things in life because somebody wanted him to.	If you go a little deep into this philosophy, you will find that actions of leaders are not driven by what others say or suggests. Their actions are driven by purpose. If you want your organization to progress, you need to identify such potential leaders in the organization who can work for a purpose. They have potential of taking your organization from Good to Great. Take the troubled employees seriously. Discuss with them what they want out of their life. You never know you may find a Narayan Murthy/Ratan Tata in your organization. Its all about identifying and grooming the right people for the right place at right time. If you will keep on looking at their resume and degrees they possess, you may never find a Dhirubhai Ambani in your organization.
Narayan Murthy	In 1981, He wanted to start Infosys. He had a vision and zero capital. He borrowed Rs. 10,000/- from Mrs. Sudha Murthy and started	If an Idea and vision can take the form of Infosys, then assume how much valuable your employees’ ideas are. The young generation is full of creativity and enthusiasm, full of ideas and may be sometimes with better vision than oldies. They can give fresh perspective for everything you do in business or profession. Don’t ignore them. For God’s sake don’t. You might not know how much damage you are doing by ignoring those ideas. It might prevent you from going bankrupt in some years. Keep Listening to them. Foster an environment where ideas are shared easily. Where they can communicate ideas with ease and without fear of rejection. Incentivize them to generate better ideas. Tell them clearly, if your ideas are implemented, we will reward you. Don’t just tell them, reward them when they do. After all, new age business cannot be done without ideas. You need their ideas badly, if you have hunger of going from Good to Great.
Ratan Tata	Legally and ethically he grown the Tata Empire from $2billion to $100billion and demonstrated the highest level of integrity and with courtesy, grace and humility.	There are several examples where Ratan Tata shown utmost level of humility and grace. What we can learn here? As a leader or an individual manager? Care for people is the key to everything. Formulating culture of care and concern will take an organization long way on the path of Good to Great. http://indiantaxblog.blogspot.in/2014/05/the-human-side-of-burning-problem-of.html Not caring for your workforce will keep you where you are. And may be down the line, you will vanish. Caring does not always mean spending on them financially; it may mean fostering a culture of respect and humanism in the organization. No wonder, there are companies that shuts down within few years of incorporation. What you think? There are only technical or financial reasons that are responsible for the same? No, there is human side of everything in life. We need to have those eyes to see the human side of everything. Even for organizational failures.
Jamsetji Tata	He was an extraordinary businessman. He donated one-third of his wealth to start the Indian Institute of Science.	Coming back to Go-Giver concept (CSR), (There is a book named Go-Giver, still to read it but I would like to use the title words). Many companies are already doing CSR activities, and even more than what presently prescribed by Companies Act, 2013. My point here is that it requires guts to do such philanthropic activities. Somewhere down the line the next generation was inherited with 50 times expansion of its empire. Doesn’t is seem magical? Yes, it indeed is. What goes around comes around. Here, we need to see the CSR activities in different manner. What you spend on your employee cost is partly your CSR expenses only. However, whatever you do for them going out of the way counts much more in terms of future rewards your organization gets.
Jamsetji Tata	'Jamsetji is a beacon and an example on how businesses should be conducted.' Says Narayan Murthy to Ratan Tata in a conversation	He was first businessman in his family. (Lesson – Never remain behind while taking risk, risk management is a concept for managing the risks that you face after you take the initial risk)
Jamsetji Tata	One of his life goal was to set up a world class learning school	Leaders always believed that education is the key to success of this nation. (Built Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore). They lived upto their belief. Many a times, business houses have money to spend but they don’t know how to invest, so they invest in shares, mutual funds and such investments. They think these as investments. While, leaders and out of the box thinkers considers charity and strengthening country’s foundation also as investments. The same proved to have helped not just the country but to the business also.

  

The above list will be unending if I keep on describing the leadership lessons from many such Business leaders, Spiritual Leaders, global political leaders, Scientists, and so on.

Takeaway Points from above discussion:

1.       A corporation can learn from Biographies of the popular leaders of this world. They adopted some virtues and visions in their life, if the same are adopted by organisations, we will see different face of this country.

2.       Businesses need to learn some crucial virtues from the leaders are:

a.       Genuine care and concern for people: Employees, in particular, are the people who gives their everything for the purpose of your business, your profits, your long term visions. Care for them, more importantly, care genuinely. Foster a culture of respect where people are not treated like machines. Mistakes happen, that doesn’t mean the person should be given firing till the time he starts crying.

b.      Make an impact on the society also: No business can survive without society, being good is not enough, you should also appear to be good.

c.       Identify the purpose of your organization: What it wants to do and achieve in its life, if there are no visible purposes of the business, find one or make a purpose to support the nation building)

d.      Value for Employee Ideas and Creativity: Foster an environment for easy sharing and communication of ideas. You can ask android developers to make a customized application for such internal communication for ideas and everything. After all, you will boast about having your own app. For your interaction with your customers, suppliers, employees, society at large.

e.      Identify leaders in organizations: For god’s sake don’t do mistake of taking more degree holders as abled leaders. The more the degree a person has, the more fearful he is. Just imagine why a person would like to have a list of degrees on his business card? You yourself may find out the answers. My point is that leaders come in all size and shape, not necessarily with degrees. Best examples, Dhirubhai Ambani, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, John Rockefeller and many others.  

f.        Risk Taking and Risk Management: Risk taking comes first, then comes risk management. Without you taking risk on new ideas, you may never reach the Greatness, neither your Organization will.

Kindly read the article on Jamsetji Tata . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamsetji_Tata

Written by CA Rajesh Pabari, reach me for feedback – carajeshpabari@gmail.com   or   919022780919

Follow on twitter - https://twitter.com/carajeshpabari