General

8 rules to win in China

| Aditya Sehgal

IMG_2628

After spending 7+ years in China, here are 8 learnings that can help you succeed :

1. In China, everything is possible, but nothing is easy

2. People want to help you in China – if someone says no, its only because you asked the wrong question. Change the question.

3. People don’t want to disappoint you in China – so they may say yes when they mean no. Change the question.

4. The way to get rich in China is first to help someone else to get rich, and then to tie your success to theirs.

5. The way to get very rich is to find many people to apply rule 4 to.

6. After the contract is signed – thats where the real negotiation starts. It never finishes.

7. Contracts are toilet paper. Relationships are key.

8. 8 is a lucky number in China. Never have more than 7 priorities (or rules)

Job satisfaction model

| Aditya Sehgal

IMG_1372

Rate yourself on the 4 parameters of this model.

IMG_1366

Significance : does your work make a difference ? To yourself, to the world, to anyone ?
Passion : do you love what you do ?
Value creation : are you creating value (monetary and non monetary) for yourself and for your organisation ?
Family : do you have a happy family life ?

Ideally you want a balanced model and high scores on all 4 elements. Plot where you stand today on the grid below.

If the model is unsymmetrical or you score yourself lower than 7 on any attribute, consider what you need to change.

IMG_1368-0.JPG

If you are looking to change jobs, plot both the old and new job on the grid. On what attributes is the new job better ? The answers may surprise !

Lessons in leadership

| Aditya Sehgal

10 rules final

One of the most effective leaders I know packaged a lifetime of outperformance in a 5 minute speech.
This post shares the essence of his leadership philosophy.

Lesson No 10 : You suck

Rule 10 - you suck
Constructively challenge your team – they can do better

Less No 9 : Bullshit

Rule 9 - bullshit
Authentic feedback and coaching. Honest. Direct. In your face.

Lesson No 8 : Mickey Mouse

Rule 7 - Mickey Mouse
The idea or proposal is too small. Encourage your team to think big

Lesson No 7 : Play hard and work hard

Rule 6 - work play hard
Every idiot can work hard, so play hard is much more important.
Play hard is important for two reasons. One is to have fun with your team, to inspire your team. Second is to live a balanced lifestyle to avoid insanity. Its important for your team to be effective, and its important for yourself to be effective, so play hard.

Lesson No 6 : Go back

Rule 8 - go back
Your team has not done its homework, the numbers are wrong, there is not enough attention to detail. Attention to detail is very important, especially in emerging markets.

Lesson No 5 : Be the lone nut

Rule 5 - the lone nut
Creating the right culture is your No 1 job. Do not fear to be the ‘lone nut’. Others will follow you.

Lesson No 4 : Strategy + People + Execution

Rule 4 - PEG
This is a very useful framework. Remember to spend 90% of your time on People, culture and execution and 10% on strategy. There are a lot of smart people who can figure out the strategy – you can always pay them.

Lesson No 3 : I trust you

Rule 3 - i trust U
Hire and surround yourself with the best people. Then show them your love. You leave them alone after the meeting to do a great job. Don’t pester them, annoy them, confuse them or reduce their motivation. If you trust them you will give them freedom. If you don’t trust them, ask them to move on. There are only two options.

Lesson No 2 : The fish stinks from the head

Rule 2 - fish head
Drive organisational change starting at the top of the organisation. If you have a problem with a company, or a function or a region, you don’t start with the little people – always start with the leadership of that unit and then make organisational changes top down.

Lesson No 1 : Bottom feeder

Rule 1 - bottom feeder
Have a clear performance rank and competition in place. The bottom 20% on a repeated basis will leave the organisation or retire. There is a very strong correlation between performance and growth in organisations and you must reward performance.
If you are yourself the bottom feeder for too long, think about whether you are holding the organisation back.

Mastering time

| Aditya Sehgal

Time is a unique resource. Everyone has the same 86,400 seconds a day – whether powerful or weak, rich or poor, senior or junior.
Over a lifetime, time does differentiate – longevity correlates to health, genes and circumstance.

In the same 31.536 million seconds a year, how do some people get more done ?

Think of a person walking in a straight line vs. a person turning at random every so often.
After a while, the person walking in a straight line may have walked less, but will be further away from the start point than the confused rambler.


In time, the gap widens, and the rambler wonders – how did the other guy get so far ahead ?

We can not ‘manage’ time, we can only manage ourselves.
By managing our priorities we manage our utilisation of time.

To have a productive, happy life – maximise purposeful movement towards a goal. Minimise aimless rambling.
At the same time, have fun and enjoy the scenery and companionship along the way.
When done well, these principles gives the illusion of ‘mastering time’.

First, set ONE core goal in a year. (if one not possible, set max 3 goals)
If you start today, decide what you will achieve before Dec 31 2014.

It is super critical to select a goal which will make you super successful, if achieved.
Its OK if the goal is audacious or difficult, but it MUST have a material impact.

If the goal is professional, you may want to start by asking your boss a simple question
‘What is the one thing you want me to deliver before Dec 31 which will make you super-successful this year ?’
This is a great test for your boss. If s/he is unable to answer this question, consider your options for moving on and finding a new boss.

Next, identify your time wasters.
Anything that doesn’t take you towards your goal is a ‘time waster’.
In a work context, these come in 2 buckets :
1. Habitual behaviours – things that you have ‘conditioned’ yourself to do – e.g.. read email, check social media etc.
2. Meetings – these may be ‘important’ but may not take you towards your goal.

Every evening, plan your next day using your calendar. Make sure a specific task related to your big goal is top of the list.

Set an out of office reply. Suggested text : ‘I am busy in meetings and will look at email only after 5 PM on XYZ date (next day). In case its a matter of life and death, reach me via text message/wechat/whatsapp’

Execute the following daily plan :

1. For the first 2 hours (most productive period) work exclusively on the big goal.

Refuse all meetings. Do not open email or log onto the internet. If you are in a cubicle wear  headphones or book a meeting room and use it in private.
Even if you have no tasks for the big goal, work on it anyway – think about it, improve your plan, find a better way to get there.

In the last 15 minutes, log on to the internet and scan any developments or trends related to your long term goal. It helps to set up a standard Google search, or use a service like Pocket, Zite or Pulse to aggregate news in your area of focus.

Once a week scan LinkedIn for people who have skills relating to your goal.

At the end of the 2 hours, your ‘real work’ for the day is done.

You can then spend the rest of your time doing whatever you want or ‘need to’.
While it seems counterintuitive that you can ‘finish your work’ in 2 hours a day, remember that in 300 working days, you can spend 600 hours focused on your goal. There are very few projects or priorities that can not be cracked in 600 hours of single minded focus.

2. Take 30 minutes to batch process and clear your emails. 

Force yourself to scan and deal with all pending email in 30 minutes.

It will be difficult at first but will become easy with practise.
Group emails by subject and look at the last email in the chain first. Look at the others only if needed.
Force yourself to either respond with a maximum 1 line answer or delete the email. In general don’t answer more than 10% of your email.
Remember – the less email you send out, the less you receive.

In case the email is very important, and you can’t answer in a few words, put in in a ‘pending’ folder. Have the discipline to not put more than 1-2 emails in this folder at this time.

3. Reward yourself for 30 minutes

Check your social media, do some of the things you like to do.

4. You are now open for meetings

Remember 3 rules for meetings :

a) Take 5 minutes before the meeting to write down your desired outcome at the end.
b) Limit each meeting to max 1hour, ideally 30 minutes. Where possible ask for a pre read and agenda. Start each meeting with the question ‘what so we need to achieve in the next 30 min’.
c) Have a conversation rather than a presentation. Steer the conversation towards your desired outcomes. Once achieved, leave.

5. Use lunch to have a ‘conversation’

Use lunch to have conversations which can help further your goal. This will infect other people with passion for your goal and will get you more support and ideas.

6. Do a daily walk around the office at least once

Chat with your colleagues. Often these interactions spur new ideas and help you develop an early waning system for issues.

7. At the end of the day, batch process email once again.

Clear your email including anything you put into ‘pending’ using the same rules as the morning.
Once your mailbox is empty, leave.
If you are unable to manage your mailbox to zero in the week, take a couple of hours extra on Friday or Saturday to manage the weeks accumulation to zero. Start each week with 0 emails in the inbox.

8. Every 2 weeks, meet someone new/external over coffee

LinkedIn is great to meet new people who have skills which can help with your big goal. You will be surprised how much new perspective and help you get.

9. Create a system to manage repetitive jobs 

If your job is repetitive, you have a great opportunity – expend one time effort to create a system to automate the work. Free up 80% of your time to follow your goal.

With practise and determination, you will be able to stick to this schedule for 70%-80% of working days – Expect days where you compromise for travel, meetings, reviews with the boss, offsite meetings etc. When back to normal, get back to the system – make it a habit and don’t slip.

When done well, in my experience, this system :
1. Gets you promoted because you deliver the big stuff and make a real difference.
2. Allows you to have fun at work. You spend a lot of time in conversations – which helps you build relationship and belonging.
3. Forces you look outwards – so you grow and develop. You find new and unexpectedly creative ways to reach your goal. You become a thought leader in the organisation.
4. Gives you job satisfaction – imagine completing your work in the first 2 hours of the day and being ‘free’ thereafter !

By managing your priorities, you project the illusion of managing time.
So next time, don’t say you don’t have time – say its not a priority.

To read some of my older posts, please click the links below

Accelerate or die

Turbocharge your impact with 16 apps 

Business and bacteria – how things grow

Failing to succeed

Colliding trends create mountains of opportunity

Chinese trains and Indian cars

My seven lenses for solving problems

| Aditya Sehgal

Six years ago, as a newcomer to China, I struggled to understand the culture. Very often, I needed to find non obvious solutions to non obvious problems.

Over time, I was fortunate to work with many Chinese friends and colleagues who widened my perspective. They taught me there are many hidden helpers to help solve my problems. This led me to develop one of my problem solving systems – my seven lenses for solving problems.

Put simply, the lenses are a bit like Edward De Bono’s thinking hats.

When I have a difficult problem to solve, before applying the lenses the first step is to understand what the problem really is. Almost every time, this simple step results in changing the problem definition – solving a very different problem than what I started with.

Once I have identified what is the ‘non obvious problem’, its time to find the ‘non obvious solution’.

I close my eyes, and with my minds eye, I apply all seven lenses, first one by one, and then in combinations to the problem till I find possible solutions to further explore and polish.

My most productive Lenses are :

1. The Partnership Lens

Is there a partner who can help ? Whose interests can be served by solving this problem ? How can I partner with them and create a win-win situation.

2. The Technology Lens

Can I apply technology to solve this problem ? Can it be automated ? Can it be turned into a ‘machine solution’ by being outsourced to someone who can solve it better ? Can a computer solve it faster/better/cheaper/easier than I can ? Is there a way to program a solution so it becomes repeatable ?

3. The Mobile/Context Lens

Does the solution lie in context/location ? Is it about where I am or what else I am doing at the moment ? Can my smartphone help me solve it with any of its capabilities ?

4. The Question Lens

Very useful when I am trying to get/negotiate something from someone. If the answer to my question is ‘No’, how can I change my question so that the answer is ‘Yes’ ? Can it be a series of questions which lead to ‘Yes’ answers and eventually to a ‘Yes’ answer to my question ?

5. The Government Lens

How can the government help me ? Is what I am doing aligned with the aims of the country ? Is it furthering Civic interest ? If it is in line with where the Government wants to go, there is usually a massive tailwind. If it is not in line, can I nudge my problem so my solution coincides with a Government focus ?

6. The Future Lens

What will be the answer to my question 2 years from now ? 10 years ? 50 years ? 100 years ago ? Do any of these answers inspire me to think how I can a) accelerate a desirable future b) bring back a desirable past ?

7. The Speed Lens

How would the solution look like if I was to do it in half the time ? 10 times faster ? 100 times faster ? How could I do it in 1 second ? What would I add to the solution if I had a year to fix it ? What if I had a century ??

Combination lenses

What if I combined the lenses in various orders ? I could have 21 possible double lens combinations (eg. speed + govt, mobile + partnership), 15 triple lens combinations, 4 quadruple lens combinations, 3 5 lens combinations, 2 6 lens combinations and 1 7 lens combinations. [Though I struggle to conceptualise any more than 3-4 lens combinations at a time]

Of course, there can be many more lenses ! This is not a MECE list (Mutually Exclusive; Collectively Exhaustive). Feel free to add on what works for you.

I suspect that in different countries you may want to add or subtract lenses from your camera. In India, a Jugaad lens works great – ‘What is the Jugaad solution’.

Of course, a lens that often is very valuable is a ‘Google lens’ – sometimes its best to use this even before the other 7 lenses. When you have a problem to solve, just google it to begin – you may be surprised !

I would love to hear about the lenses you would like to add to the toolkit ? Is there a problem solving approach or lens that works well for you ? Please do share in comments below, by communicating with me or by connecting on my Linked in account cn.linkedin.com/pub/aditya-sehgal/3/88/3a8/

Photo credit : Photojojo.com who sell Holga lenses with the multiple lens selector –  for photography, not problem solving !

Failing to succeed

| Aditya Sehgal

Behind every success is failure.

If the success is big, expect to find either a big failure behind it, or multiple small failures.

Progress comes from overcoming inertia. Inertia and habits drive people to do things the same way over and over.
Not trying new things in good times leads to short term avoidance of failure, but leads to catastrophic long term failure.

When times are bad people are at their most creative and inventive. The natural response to pain is to act to remove it. Tough times force people to re-evaluate their habits and look for better ways to solve their problems. These solutions become new habits which drive future success till they become obsolete in turn.

If failure is big, it could result in significant value destruction for an organisation.
On the other hand, if an organisation is not failing enough, it is not learning enough and is ripe for being disrupted.

How then, can an organisation address this paradox between failure and success ?

The trick is to build a culture of ‘failing small, often’ to reduce the chances of ‘failing big’.

The impact of reacting to multiple ‘small failures’ on an organisational scale can drive the organisation in serendipitous directions and enable success that may not have been ‘planned for’.

This ‘fail small, fail often’ culture need to be driven top down and designed into an organisation’s DNA.

5 areas to think about to drive this cultural shift :

1. Change from a directive organisation towards a directional organisation

Decide the company purpose, goals and accepted behaviours high up in the organisation and push decision rights down.

If the organisation’s goals and philosophies are clearly expressed, every employee can judge whether their decisions will take the company where it wants to go, in the right way. This enables them to make small decisions. This culture, when spread across an organisation, can result in an adaptive organisation and faster decision making. Many small risks are taken and many small learnings can be shared or scaled up. In the opposite model where decision rights are concentrated, the risks get aggregated at each level and by the time a decision is taken the cost of failure becomes higher.

2. Cut the bureaucracy 

There are no alignment meetings with just 1 person in a role. With 5 people there are 20 points of alignment, with 25 people there are 600. Alignment and meetings increase faster than headcount.
When an organisation becomes large and allocates decision rights to senior levels, few people can say ‘yes’, and many can say ‘no’.
New and disruptive ideas get killed before they a decision making level.
To manage bureaucracy and encourage small experiments, organisations should either cut layers or delegate decision making rights downwards.

3. Encourage small innovation 

Encourage everyone to innovate. Celebrate small success. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen)
Focus the team on consumers and on looking outwards to seemingly unrelated areas for new ideas. Cut the tendency to focus on navel gazing and competition watching.

4. Start pretoyping (http://www.pretotyping.org ) 

Pretotyping is a concept developed by Alberto Savoia (http://www.albertosavoia.com) It enables teams to ‘fake it before they make it’. This limits the cost of failure and dramatically increases the number of ‘experiments’ that an organisation can conduct in a given amount of time/money. Organisations can choose to scale up only initiatives that are proven to work. The pretotyping mentality can be applied across the organisation.

5. Design the organisation for collaboration, plan for serendipity.

http://www.thefutureorganization.com/design-collaboration-plan-serendipity/ Engineer ‘informal’ and ‘unrelated’ interaction.

Failure is as big a driver of personal success as business success.

For an interesting perspective on failure as a driver of personal success see Scott Adam’s interview herehttp://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626104579121813075903866