Business Book Guide - Literature review Example

«Business Book Guide» Learning objectives: This book equips the user with the ability to face the various business situations by comparing them to real life do or die scenarios faced by trainees in the armed forces. It helps the reader to: Overcome personal inhibitions and limitations to achieve the desired business and personal goals while working in a real business scenario. Understand the importance of setting personal goals to achieve success. Understand the key factors that are required to help reach the desired objectives in both business and personal situations. Find ways of imbibing those key factors within one’s own competencies to ensure that those abilities become a way of working under all circumstances. Business Vs Combat Scenario: The scenario in a business situation is no different from one in the battle field. The uncertainties in a battle field are the same as those in the daily operations of a business. In the air battle situation, you never know when the enemy will strike or when you will come across unfavorable weather conditions when maneuvering the jet in the right direction becomes a very tricky task. The pilot has all the data from the various complicated systems installed on the plane, but he only has fraction of a second to decide what needs to be done the very next moment. Similarly, in the business case also the managers do not know when their competitors are going to change their strategies to threaten the very existence of the current business. The business or political environment can change at any time to make carrying out the business in a particular geographic location or in a particular style highly impossible. Other similarities between the situations can be seen in the fact that air force pilots work in a team of wingmen. This helps the main pilot focus on important things as the other team member takes up the task of providing the support function. In the same way managers and leaders also work in teams. How they use their team members and what role they assign to each member depends on the working style of the managers. All through the rest of the sections, we will practically understand how the business should be treated as a battleground and use the skills learnt there to run a successful business. Key competencies required for a successful business: Complete dedication towards one’s goal Life can be pointless without a goal which you sincerely believe in. Every individual has different passions for which they can do anything under the sun. If these passions are directed towards positive direction, these can give the required kick to their lives. Commitment to these passions or goals should be sincere and be based on the individual’s beliefs and not based on what others expect of him or her. It is very important to know what you exactly want out of life before achieving a complete commitment to a goal. This is because, if you are not clear about where you want to go you will never find the way as you will keep changing directions at the slightest provocation. This provocation could be in terms of the difficulties one faces in achieving the business targets. Trust Once you have full commitment from your own self, it is important to trust others as everything cannot be achieved by your efforts alone. We are social beings and cannot work individually all the time. In a business scenario our partners are our clients, our team members, colleagues from other departments like IT and finance, external suppliers and so on. Hence, any business operation can work well if its members work as a team of individuals who trust each other. As a pilot depends on his team member to provide him the support system to take the right decision while keeping focus on flying, in the same way, a business manager needs support from other departments and team members. If he doesn’t trust any of the partners, say team members, he might overburden himself with unnecessary responsibilities which others can perform. This might leave him with no time to focus on other important tasks which he alone is good at. More action than words Once complete trust has been achieved, it is important to embark on action plan rather than focus only on keeping oneself and others motivated. Motivation without action does not stand through the test of time. One needs to resolve to act to achieve the business goals keeping the following important key performance ingredients in mind: Consistency of effort is the key to success in any business case. If, as a manager, you are publishing sales data on a weekly basis to drive sales, then it is important to carry on with this activity consistently over a long period of time even after achieving particular target sales level. Any deviation from this would lead to non-achievement of required goal. All hurdles that come in the course of following a set action plan to achieve a target should be faced with confidence and presence of mind. You need to think out of the box solutions for the problems you are facing. All your efforts should be focused on achieving the desired goal and this focus should be maintained till the end. Your effort should be to the best of your abilities both physical and mental. Push yourself harder because opportunity lost once is lost forever. Remember that you can’t do everything on your own. Don’t feel ashamed to ask for help if need be. But you must know when to ask for help. Only after you have exhausted all your resources and efforts in resolving glitches, should you look for outside help. At times it is a good philosophy not to re-invent the wheel. So, if you have the requisite data from experienced sources it is always good to use that and get a head start. Help can come from any of the partners – team members, customers, peers, bosses etc. There is no harm is accepting their help and acknowledging their contribution at the requisite forum. For example, if you have taken your subordinate’s or colleague’s help in collating some data for a presentation, you can acknowledge the same during or at the end of the presentation or thank him or her through an e-mail with a copy to the team and his bosses. This will boost his or her image as well as fetch you trust. Time to reflect 1. Why do you think the author has used the analogy of the air force combat scenario to explain the business situation? Can is really help if we work with a combat mindset in the business world? What can be pros and cones of this working style? 2. Why do you think mission is so important in the business case scenario? 3. Case study – You are a manager in an organization (for example a credit cards division of a bank). You are responsible for sales as well as the customer service pieces of the department. However, operations are out of your work scope. You have come across a situation where your bosses are satisfied with the sales as they are going up month on month (though not very substantially), however they are concerned about the rising customer complaints that too at a substantial rate. They have asked you to look into the situation and come up with an action plan within a week and implement the same. Explain the scenario and you course of action using the points raised in the previous sections. (Hint: How will you set your goal and achieve commitment towards it? How will you seek help from others and build trust among the various partners? – remember operations are not in your hands and flaws could be happening at that end rather than in your department. How will you ensure consistency of efforts?) 4. Outdoor exercise – Find yourself a wingman who is not related you professionally but is more experienced than you in some field or the other. Now try to use his or her help in some predefined activities (after a mutual consensus). First try to do those activities on your own. Then work with your partner to perform the same activities as a team with one goal. Make a note of the difference in the two situations. Make a list of problems faced in the two scenarios. Also note the advantages of the two situations (if any). Which is a better work setting? How to face the various hurdles that one faces while operating a business? Plan for business contingencies (Macro level planning) It is very important to understand the macro level working scenario of the business you are in and prepare a contingency plan accordingly. For example, you need to understand the political and economic conditions of the region of your operations. Based on the study a plan should always be ready to ensure that the business does not get affected if a particular government comes in power. What will the leadership’s approach be is a protectionist government comes to power? Would it be advisable to shift a part of or complete business to some other location? What are the pros and cones of the various decisions? These are the questions a firm’s managers should be ready with. The same applies to the implementation of a new process. How is the process going to start? Who will be the various SPOCs (Single Point Of Contact) for implementation and during the transition phase? What are the timelines of the various phases? What will be the course of action in case a particular step fails? Perform Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA) on current systems (Micro level planning) FMEA is another way of planning for contingencies but at a more detailed level. It is a good idea to analyze what will be the effect of failure of any one process or department or step in a process. What can be the mode of this failure and how will it impact the business? An FMEA is in the form of a table where the various options can be listed. It looks like the following: Failure Mode Effect Analysis Describe the failure situation. What can cause the failure? What business impact can it have? Various options and their analysis This is exactly what a pilot needs to do before he takes off on a combat course. Many hours are spent in simulating the various failure scenarios and deciding the various steps that need to be taken to counter these failures. Deep analysis to the minutest detail is done till all the possible failure modes are exhausted. Thus, when a pilot flies, he is already ready with most of the answers to various eventualities as there is no time to think about the various options at the time of flying. This gives him confidence to face any situation. Similarly, in the business scenario also you need to put yourself into testing situations. Keep asking what if…for every step. This will prepare you for the worse. Challenge the current processes and systems Most of us are happy if we are meeting targets. We do not want to disturb the process as it may cause unnecessary commotion and anxiety. However, it is important to ask why are we doing a particular task in this way and why not that? What will happen if we change our targets? Have we managed to get the best possible efficiencies out of the system? Is this the best in class? All these questions will open up a number of options to improve what seems to be good. There is always a scope of improvement, provided you are ready to take up the challenge. Complacence is your worst enemy, be it combat or business situation. Multitasking This characteristic is not always a virtue. Too many tasks at hand lead to a lack of focus on any one. A better way of managing too many tasks could be to delegate responsibilities to trusted and competent team members or partners in a project. This will help in keeping focus on the tasks which are very critical for a successful culmination of an activity. This is where the importance of working in a team can be understood. With work distributed among various team members, each task receives adequate focus. This is exactly what pilots do. They have the wingmen to help them with the support tasks, while the pilot himself is focused on flying and related activities. Role of distraction Distraction can have both positive as well as negative outcomes. If you can practice to focus in a distracted environment, it is a great way of putting pressure on yourself and training yourself to face the hurdles of a business. However, if the same distraction is putting you off your course, then you will be moving away from the direction of your goal. Pressure causes the best in you to come out. Thus, it would be a good idea to put pressure on you by causing various distractions. For example, answering phone calls, resolving your team member’s issues, asking your wingmen to put all types of questions about the various contingencies he can think of etc. However, you should not allow these distractions to guide you away from your goal. For example, if a phone call makes you feel that you are wasting your effort on the wrong activity or says that there are better opportunities in other activities, then you should think twice before changing your course of action. You should question yourself whether it is really true. Break activities into small processes Most of the work in a business organization involves long interconnected processes. These are also dependent on inputs from other business units. For example, selling of credit cards involves sales department at the front end. At the back end there is operations department which is responsible for the processing and database management, underwriting department which decides the quality of the customer to give the credit card, IT department, finance department etc. While working on a regular basis the importance of these individual units gets lost and the focus remains on increasing sales or firefighting with customer relations issues. If the entire chain of activities is broken down and analyzed, a number of non-value add items can be found. Thus, if things get too complex, it is advisable to break them down into manageable portions. This will help in focusing on the right issues and finding the apt solutions. For example, the reason for decrease in sale could be the high turnaround time required for processing because of which the customer turns to other companies. However, we might be assuming it to be customer relations problem because we never analyzed the process in parts and looked for problems in each piece. The Business Process Outsourcing industry makes use of this principal to achieve maximum efficiencies. The processes are broken down into sub-processes to see which of those can be outsourced to take maximum price advantage. Thus, in such a scenario, a card might be issues in the US, but its complete processing might be happening in China or India. Even the customer service issues might be getting resolved outside of U.S.A. This is because the company opted to get some pieces of the entire process done from countries which can give it good quality at a low cost. Do not be rigid Flexibility is the key to success under any condition. In the business environment we have to deal with different people as well as situations. It can be very detrimental to the business or the individual if he tends to hold on to rigid ideas and is unable to adapt to the environment around him. As seen earlier, no one can work solo in a business situation where all processes are interdependent. Thus, an operations manager cannot work without the support of the Information Technology (IT) department. Similarly, an IT manager is not needed if there are to automated operations. Thus, building a network with the individuals of the various departments is of primary importance for successfully running of a business. Flexibility is also required when you come across situations which you have never encountered before. This is a very common scenario in the business world. Every day is a new challenge. For example, if the situation demands that a process needs to run during the night due to some technical snags in the day, the managers and the team members need to be flexible enough to understand the situation and adapt fast. Time to reflect 1. What actions from your side can ensure that the business runs successfully under various challenging circumstances? Explain in details with examples. 2. Can you think of the various challenges a rigid manager can face in his work scenario? Imagine that you are running a very critical process which can cause production loss if stopped. You are facing some IT issues and have to deal with a very rigid manager in that department. What various options can you think of to counter this challenge? Explain the various options and describe their pros and cones. 3. You have joined a company which has started its operations only a year back. Think of the various situations which you will come across while working towards building new systems (use the concepts from the section discussed above). What are the various options in your hands to overcome the various hurdles of working in a growing company? 4. How will things change with respect to the above situation if you were to join a well established and old organization? How will the challenges be different from the ones faced in the new company described above? Based on your understanding of the concepts in the above section, explain how you should prepare yourself for the situation. Read More