The Hindu Business Line : Small steps to success

Bhaskar and Vidhya, very close friends of my family, are the proud parents of Vikram, who is almost a year old. We called on them a few weeks ago and had the pleasure of seeing how much Vikram had grown in the last few months. He had a marvellous smile, with his one tooth standing out like a beacon; he was forever crawling hither and thither. He sat up, caught hold of the nearest object and tottered around on wobbly legs. Once in a while, he would land with a thud on his b ottom, give us all a radiant smile and try again. We were enchanted.

I wondered if the baby had an inbuilt and intuitive mechanism that told him to take a step-by-step approach to doing as momentous a thing as crawling and then walking. And to keep doing it till he got it right. Driving home after our visit, the realisation hit me that that in our efforts to keep up with the pace of events around us, we perhaps do not take enough baby steps once we become adults. An oxymoron, if ever there was one. This applies to our work as much as it applies to our personal lives.

At work, most often, compressed time cycles seemingly demand that big steps be taken quickly so that things can be achieved sooner. There is a fallacy here as there is no guarantee that speed of action translates to effectiveness. Equally, slowness of action does not guarantee results either. The road to successful results is made up of carefully crafted strategy and deliberate and clear-headed execution. Strategy and execution represent two sides of the same coin and they are both equally important. Very often, we find that such deliberation is not seen in action when we are faced with a situation that seemingly demands an instant response. It is possible that the situation may indeed require a rapid response, but before any action is taken, it will be a good idea to deconstruct both the situation and the response and take the necessary incremental steps to address the issue effectively and in time. In essence, the necessary baby steps need to be taken, but in quick time.

We are all witnesses to the frenzy that afflicts teams when some customer deliverables are urgent. Many a time, in order to meet a time deadline, shortcuts are taken with inevitable results: Customer unhappiness and needless rework. This has multiple consequences — the company’s image suffers, costs soar and the employees’ morale dips. What is needed here is to make sure that the process of planning and execution are laid out clearly so that bite-sized pieces can be allocated for implementation.

The assembly line technique first adopted by Henry Ford is a prime example of deconstruction of activities and assigning of individual responsibilities so that the activity can be performed efficiently and effectively by the whole team. If planned and executed well, there will be very little need for the application of the famous SAM philosophy. SAM, stands for solpa adjust madu kolli or ‘please adjust a little bit’ in Kannada! Increasingly, the world demands delivery as per agreed terms and the SAM philosophy has little to recommend it.

This is not to say that taking small steps is all that is required to address today’s organisational needs. Many a time, leaps, intuitive or otherwise, have to be taken. This does not militate against the need to take baby steps; if anything, this is a necessary adjunct to it. They are both necessary mental disciplines that need to work in tandem. A successful manager knows the importance of when to use each approach and how to use them effectively together.

Genius, it is said, is 99 per cent perspiration and 1 per cent inspiration. In essence, a lot of repetitive and frustrating hard work goes in and the final leap of genius is what converts it to a breakthrough that is a triumph of human thought. Vikram will soon walk without help and will forget that he took baby steps before he got to walking steadily. We do not have that luxury — we need to remember to take our baby steps when necessary even as we walk steadily. We also need to be ready to make that leap from time to time

(The writer is advisor to 3i Infotech, Blue River Capital and IDFC Pvt Equity.)