REFLECTIONS : IMPRESSIONS – PART I

Each day is born with a sunrise
and ends in a sunset, the same way we
open our eyes to see the light, 
and close them to hear the dark.
You have no control over
how your story begins or ends.
But by now, you should know that
all things have an ending.
Every spark returns to darkness.
Every sound returns to silence.
And every flower returns to sleep
with the earth.
The journey of the sun
and moon is predictable.
But yours, 
is your ultimate
 ART.” 
― Suzy Kassem

Life’s a journey filled with lessons, hardships, anguishes, blisses, festivities and special moments. You can choose to ride the journey of your life however you want. If you are looking for a catalyst that will re-connect you with that bit of your soul, reflect back on your life journey. There’s something inside us all that craves to make an optimistic impact on the world around us. As George Bernard Shaw said, Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. Our life journey will always have deep impressions on our character, choices, and responses. Every milestone of my journey has helped me re-focus on my goals. Not only challenging me emotionally and intellectually, it has also provided an opportunity for my personal growth and professional genuineness. Through this blog, sharing few of my life and career images with you…! I have labelled my thoughts & quotes as ‘Reflections: Impressions’ and this is Part-I.

ORGANIZATION

• “Deep-dive a non-performing organization and you will find mushrooming weeds of unengaged employees”
• “Erase words like Soft Skills & Training from Corporate Dictionary, People development is in the character of the organization and not in sporadic events”
• “Vibrant organizations are built on encouraging questions and not on providing solutions”
•  “In a dysfunctional organization people talk ‘about’ each other and not ‘with’ each other.
•  “There is no point being averse to term ‘Disruption’ in business, actually it talks about capability of endangering innovative choices”
•  “All successful companies were not preordained to be successful. Just scratch the surface and you will find harsh lonely journey of hard work and shared purpose”
•  “Only a dysfunctional company can afford to rely on oblivious opinions of a small self-seeking coterie at top for the rest of the organization”
• “Entrepreneurs can’t be anything other than entrepreneurs, it is not conceivable for them to basket risk-taking arrogance and be predictable”
• “The vacillating pointer in a success viewfinder of any organization gets locked at how it delights employees today”
• “Retention Bonus at top management level is a tool for safeguarding interests of those CXOs who do not have any future employment possibilities outside”
• “An enterprise overly obsessed with economic returns will perish, unless entrenched with transparent sensitivity towards ecosystem”
• “Focus on growth trajectory builds a regressive affliction on non-performers to mimic behaviour that of a fretting ignored schoolboys”
• “The great Indian Corporate Circus: Company descends but CEO prospers”
• “Retention bonus is an ornamental gizmo for under-performers to remain ‘pre-paid’ in any eventuality. An unrestricted barefaced practice of deceiving logic”
• “For any organization, investing in future leadership is the only choice left to achieve next level of Transformation”
• “Selective blindness is a contagious corporate lifestyle ailment, where infection becomes wild once you climb the apex”
• “It is not just transfer of wealth or business, but the “core values”…should be the key to find a common ground between generations”
• “When organization structure is circumscribed by Lines & Boxes, independent of competencies, first fatal casualty will be the Shared Purpose”
• “Oppressive behaviour in corporate world comes in all forms”
• “Companies with enchained corporate governance have higher chances to become a history”
• “The invincible paradox: An enterprise will not mind footing a “huge bill” to  a consulting firm for suggesting choices to minimize the costs”
• “Murphy’s Law in office: Your boss will call you only when you are packing for the day”
• “The most traumatic part of a review is ‘reconciliation of figures’. The ‘number-crunchers’ at HO are witchdoctors of inventive accounting”
• “Performance Appraisal is one exercise where ‘ratings’ are decided first and people are affixed subsequently”
• “Support functions (IT, HR, BD, Strategy, PMO, etc.) turn weighty NPAs when fail to offer decipherable values”
• “The only prescription to combat the disruptive business forces is to excavate all possible dysfunctionalities from the company”
• “A company, quick in mastering the desired changes to overcome dysfunctionalities, can only create enduring value for the shareholders”
• “Typically, the post-mortem review of a business is an amphitheatre for the blame game”
• “Today disruptive innovation is bullying all epic “too large to fail” firms and shoving towards an inexorable catastrophe”
• “A Company, where QA is headed by a privileged mediocre, generally gets vended dirt cheap”
• “In many companies, product and service quality complaints are received or directed to an administrative person who hardly has any concerned about quality”
• “Appraisal Time: To reach at the “extreme” right side of the bell curve, you have to be an extremely blue eyed minion”
• “Both, Funders and Founders, half way between realize that project wouldn’t work and one that they buried could have been more promising”
• “A dysfunctional organization is magnetically predisposed to silos, collapsed networking, and shared-irresponsibility”
• “In bulk of Startups’ ‘value propositions’ and ‘market needs’ are inversely proportionate to each other”
• “Whether you are a Founder or a Punter depends on whether you are in the market ‘before’ or ‘after’ the right time”
• “Blind emphasis on strategic & financial analysis makes an acquisition a perfect gambling proposition”
• “Nowadays, Founders are already having post-mortem report of Startup venture before its birth”
• “Financial returns are of the slighter value than values such as quality, transparency, and customer profitability”
• “Higher stakes in the business trigger equally higher enticements for  dishonourable practices”
• “A corporation turns into heap of matrix muddle, when CEO becomes a proverbial rubber stamp”
• “Performing well is not enough! Perform differently”
• “Accountability doesn’t just ‘materialize’ on its own. It must be inspired and visibly answerable at the top”
• “In corporate politics, talent to unfeelingly echoing a ‘white-lie’ about your rival time after time, will make it a genuine truth”
• “The only option left for companies to endure is to “act with sense of urgency”. Strategic deliberations are sterile luxury in market”
• “The mind-numbing rhetoric to justify a pre-programed agenda offers a very flimsy foundation for people engagement”
• “HO is perceived as an implausible surplus by the branches. Essentially, the bone of contention is: Air-Conditioned Conceptual PPT v/s Perspiring Ground Realities”

So, see you next with part-II of Reflections: Impressions attributed to Leadership. Please feel unreserved to share my thoughts with your professional colleagues.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch…!

If my ship sails from sight, it doesn’t mean my journey ends, it simply means the river bends.-Enoch Powell