First the words;Eulogy: a speech or piece of writing that praises someone or something highly, especially a tribute to someone who has just died. Elegy: An elegy is a sad poem, usually written to praise and express sorrow for someone who is dead. But eulogies, Wikipedia assures me, can also be delivered at retirement functions and other such events when a person is leaving you but not for the next world. I assume that it is not a crime to deliver a eulogy, so to speak, by simply expressing appreciation and thanks to someone who has been good to you in different ways, without any formal function or speechmaking. …https://yawarbaig.com/seewithyourheart/eulogy-or-elegy/

Snakes have always had a fascination for us. We fear them, some people worship them, we hate them, and we kill them. Those who don’t do any of this and instead, appreciate them for what they are; rodent controllers, snake population controllers and just plain law-abiding citizens with as much, if not more, right to be left alone in peace, than we do, are a rare breed. The reason is the prevailing ignorance about snakes and the proliferation of myths. Ignorance breeds myths and that leads to hatred. This is the basis of all stereotyping, demonization and violence; ignorance about the subject. Applies to all subjects, be they snakes or people.

Accompanying Article: https://yawarbaig.com/seewithyourheart/how-to-behave-around-snakes/

Learning and even more relearning, is a key survival skill as well as the single most important skill that any person can learn and continue to remain adept in, if he wants to be and remain successful throughout his life. I will tell you in a minute why I say that relearning is even more important. But first something about learning. …https://yawarbaig.com/wherearetheleaders/learning-how-to-learn/

Sometimes people ask me for the secret of success. We live in a world of fantasy where people want magic formulae for everything. Let me tell you the good news. It is not a secret, but it is a magic formula. Focus + Investment + Consistency. Works every time. …Read more at https://yawarbaig.com/wherearetheleaders/fikr/

Success seems to breed fear of failure. This is a paradox, since success should really build confidence. It does that too, but what seems to happen over the years is that we become progressively more afraid of losing what we have created and our ability to take risks decreases. This to me explains why entrepreneurs who have built large organizations are so afraid to allow others to take the same kind of risks that they took when they were alone, creating the company. Somehow, as they succeed, people who build organizations seem to forget the real lessons of their experience.https://yawarbaig.com/wherearetheleaders/success-is-the-biggest-danger/

To read more, visit https://yawarbaig.com/wherearetheleaders/success-is-the-biggest-danger/

Sometimes people ask me for the secret of success. We live in a world of fantasy where people want magic formulae for everything. Let me tell you the good news. It is not a secret, but it is a magic formula. Focus + Investment + Consistency. Works every time.

I have given it the acronym, FIKR – K from the phonetic pronunciation of Consistency (Konsistency). As for R – well, we’ll get to it. Just remember FIKR

One

of the most famous cases is that of Dashrath Manjhi, a poor villager in Bihar,

who literally carved a road out of a mountain. When his wife died tragically

because he was unable to get her to a hospital in time thanks to the fact that

he had to go around a mountain to get to the main road, he decided to cut the

mountain and build a road. He carved a path 110 meters long, and 9.1 meters

wide to form a road through the rocks in Gehlour Hill so that nobody else would

need to suffer the same fate. It took him, working with a chisel and hammer, 22

years.

You

can read more about him here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi

What was his secret? Focus + Investment + Consistency. Works every

time.

In

1983, I had just returned from Guyana and joined the tea planting industry in

the Anamallais. On my first annual vacation, I attended a two-week residential,

experiential learning workshop on Applied Behavioural Science by the Indian

Society of Applied Behavioural Science (ISABS), in Jaipur. I found it very

beneficial and was impressed by the potential to help people that lay in this

line of work. I was particularly impressed by Mr. Aroon Joshi whose

facilitation enabled me not only to understand myself better but to resolve

some issues which had been bothering me. Aroon has been my dear friend and

mentor ever since. The long and short of this was that I decided that I would

make training, my profession. I was a tea planter. And I wanted to make a career

in training. Sounds crazy. It was. How did I do it? That’s what I want to share

with you. I hope you will be able to benefit from the lessons I learnt in my

life.

Before

I go into the how, let me tell you what I did since then, so that you have a complete

picture in your mind. From the time you saw a young tea planter, sitting on the

floor in an ISABS Lab (that is how it worked), agonizing over his work

relationships, you would have seen him single-mindedly focused on learning how

to train, to taking some very hard decisions and risks which would have left

many, freaked out. You would have seen him speak to his first client and stake

his reputation in his pitch. You would have seen him succeed and fail but

succeed more and never fail at the same thing twice. In short, you would have

seen him learning. Learning all the time. Enjoying learning, which enabled him

to take ever higher risks. You would have seen him challenging himself and

doing things which most people in any line of work, never do i.e. write

thirty-six books. Today, I have trained over 200,000 people on three continents

from practically every nationality, race and walk of life.

From

where I started in training, I specialized in leadership development. That is

what excited me. To see people come in, looking like something off the clothesline

and walk out, straight and tall with a glint in their eye and to know that I’d

had something to do with that. Over the years, now almost 40, several times I

have had people come up to me in an airport or in a restaurant and say, “I

“First

To Log In, First To Log Out

People

born in the mid-to-late 1970s are the last generation of humans on the planet

to have grown up without the internet. Social scientists call them the Last of

the Innocents. In his book The End of Absence, Vancouver writer Michael Harris

calls people who grew up prior to the popularisation of digital culture

“digital immigrants” — they have lived both “with and without the crowded

connectivity of online life.”

Soon

no person on earth will remember what the world was like before the internet.

There will be records, of course (stored in the intangibly limitless archive of

the cloud), but the actual lived experience of what it was like to think and

feel and be human before the emergence of big data will be gone.

The

demise of the Last of the Innocents will mean the loss of an entire plane of

human experience — the time when, faced with long hours of nothing to do, our

attention was allowed to wander; when there was time for reflection and

introspection and devoting attention to people we were actually with; when idle

summer nights could be spent in the yard catching fireflies and days would be

spent lying in the grass looking for faces in clouds. – The Guardian”

You

can read the whole article here: http://bit.ly/2TRpCAz

Not the river I mentioned but another like it, in Yala National Park, Sri Lanka

Dear

God! How true that is!!! I am so grateful that I am one of the ‘Innocents’. And

I can still recall what it was like to lie in the sand of a riverbed on a dark

night, looking up at the stars and wondering if what I was seeing was still

there. I didn’t even have a wristwatch because those were rare and, in any

case, I was too poor to afford one. Such beautiful days. I recollect this when

today, thanks to big data my words are transmitted all over the world to places

that I have never been to and probably never will. I have seen both worlds.

Countries where my podcasts are downloaded….what’s with Greenland, eh!!

First

a disclaimer: Nostalgia alert: Not everything old is or was good. Not

everything new is or was bad. But nostalgia feels so good. Enjoy and keep the

salt handy.

In

the world before plastics, glasses were made of glass, or copper or silver and

water tasted better in them. Bottles were transparent glass or opaque ceramic.

But both were breakable and did. Plates were ceramic beautifully painted. Also,

breakable and did. We also had steel plates which didn’t break but were less

classy. Buckets and tubs were unbreakable, made of copper or galvanized iron

and made a loud clang when you put them down and dropped the handle. So, you

were careful to put the handle down gently. 

Shopping

bags were cloth, washed and reused until they wore out and then served as dish

and polishing cloths until they vanished. Chairs were wooden or metal – some

foldable, some not. All heavy and unstackable. So, when plastic bottles,

plates, cups, buckets and tubs and above all plastic bags came to be, we were

thrilled out of our minds. Transparent like glass but doesn’t break? Buckets

and tubs lifting which didn’t break your back? Chairs that could be stacked and

put away when you didn’t need them? Shopping bags that you could print your

label on and which the customer could use for other things or simply throw

away? No need to wash and dry and reuse. Truly a vision of convenience heaven.

Interestingly, success seems to breed fear of failure. This is a paradox, since success should really build confidence. It does that too, but what seems to happen over the years is that we become progressively more afraid of losing what we have created and our ability to take risks decreases. This to me explains why entrepreneurs who have built large organizations are so afraid to allow others to take the same kind of risks that they took when they were alone, creating the company. Somehow, as they succeed, people who build organizations seem to forget the real lessons of their experience:

* That it was speed of reaction and the ability to take risks that gave them the competitive advantage.

* That it was the willingness to put themselves on the line, which built their credibility.

* That it was staying in touch with customers that helped them anticipate trends.

This seems to extend even more to their own children, a phenomenon that we see in many family owned companies where the old, often senile, patriarch rules supreme and holds the strings of power.

That is also why such organizations finally break-up, usually with a lot of rancor, as the rebellion against authority comes to a head and the son has no alternative but to break away.

This fear of failure has many respectable names: Consolidation of gains, Stability, Creating Permanence and so on.

What is forgotten is that life is about change and positive change is growth.  That growth is not looking with a satisfied glow at what exists, but always to seek what might be. And that all growth is essentially characterized by a lack of stability, living with impermanence and spending what you have, to fuel what you aspire to create. This is forgotten, not by chance or accident. It is forgotten deliberately, albeit sometimes unconsciously. And it is done to deal with the fear of failure if one continues to take risk.

So, what is the alternative?                                          

In my view, the alternative is to practice change even when there is no need for it.

Some organizations create think-tanks whose job is to conceptualize hypothetical threat situations and suggest solutions. One can use this or any other method, but it is a very good idea to spend some time and energy in anticipating the future and preparing for it. I personally make it a point to do this kind of reflective observation every so often. The important thing is to make this an ongoing process, no matter how you do it. Anticipating change is the first step to creating game changers that will put you in the driving seat. That is the only guarantee of permanence in a world where permanence is against nature. Any other route only guarantees stagnation of ideas, sanctification of monumental stupidity, and calcification of the mind.

The single biggest and most critical requirement of success is the desire to be the best. No matter what you may do – if you want to succeed, you need to be passionate about what you do and want to be the best at it. This is something that I have been aware of all my life. I always wanted to be the best at whatever I did. Read the most, get the best results at school, train my dog so that it would win in tracking and show championships, school my horse so that he would win in dressage competitions every time, climb the biggest mountain I could find, do what nobody had done before, go where nobody had gone before me. Always trying to excel in whatever I put my hand to. I never saw any thrill in simply doing more of the same. I always wanted to do something new. And that’s a very cool way to live.

It is not that I succeeded on every occasion.

Have you ever been in the shower

in a 5-star hotel, nice and wet all over and you reach for the shampoo bottle,

only to find that there are three? That is not because you are drunk and are

seeing triple but because you are faced with three identical bottles but with

totally different contents. What is in the bottles is not a mystery of course.

It has been helpfully printed on the label. However, the label was designed by

a 20-something design engineer sitting in a sweatshop in India or Bangladesh,

who has never seen the inside of a 5-star hotel shower and won’t until he gets

old enough to need glasses to read and the money to pay for the hotel. Then he

will realize what he did all his life when he is forced to play Russian

Roulette with the shampoo, body lotion (complicated way to say ‘soap’) and

conditioner. If you think this is funny, put conditioner on your head instead

of shampoo and you will think that is even funnier. That is perhaps the reason

why I had to decline a haircut recently which was for Rs. 350 on the plea that

I refuse to pay more than Re. 1 per hair, aforementioned number being an

optimistic hair-count of my head. The refusal of hair to adhere to my scalp may

be ascribed to the times that I used conditioner instead of shampoo. No

self-respecting hair can stand such treatment and so they decide to part

company with me forever.

“What’s the big deal?” you ask

me. “Why can’t you read the label?”

“I need glasses to read but I

don’t need glasses to shower. So, I don’t wear glasses in the shower, which is

where I need glasses to read the labels on the bottles.”

What is the solution?

Take all shower bottle label

designers to a 5-star hotel, blindfold them, strip them naked and shove them

into the shower.

Why blindfold them?

How else will they understand how

it feels to hold the bottle in your hand and not know what is in it?

Customer Satisfaction and

Customer Delight can be condensed into one phrase and that is, “See with their

eyes.” The keyword being ‘Their’.

Let me give you another example.

A good friend sent me this video: Titled Mumbai Motorman, peeing in front of

local train. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5lt4avsHsM

As they say, ‘When you gotta go

you gotta go.’ But then the question arises, where does he go? And what’s more,

what if he had to do more than just irrigate the tracks? And even more

critical, what if the ‘Motorman’ was a ‘Motorwoman’. Incidentally for those who

may think that I am being facetious, let me assure you that I have seldom been

more serious in my life. This, lack of facilities to do it decently and in

private, is a major problem with Traffic Police Constables also, especially

women Constables. Maybe the fact that we don’t have a distinct word for a

woman police constable is an indicator of our blindness to their

needs.

To return to our ‘Motorman’ video

and the lessons from it, the reason the man has to do what he did is because

the designer of the engine driver’s cab, never drove an engine in his life. If

you think I am exaggerating, let me tell you another story.

In 2000 I was invited to teach a

series of leadership courses, which we called From Managing to Leading, for the

design team of one of the two major truck manufacturers in India. There were

totally two hundred engineers who would take this 3-day residential course at

...

This is why it happens

 Whenever I speak of

customer service, I am reminded of how some people from north India, from the

Hindi speaking belt of UP and MP pronounce it. They say, ‘Kasht-mar service’.

Now ‘Kasht’ in Hindi means ‘difficulty’. And ‘Mar’ means to die. So, the literal

translation of ‘Kasht-Mar’ would be (Kasht-say-mar) meaning ‘die slowly with

difficulty’. Not a very nice thing to say but that is what some people in the

business of providing service seem to be saying to their customers (Kashtmars).

Customer service is about customers, not about the content, technology or industry in which those customers operate. This is a very important thing to understand and accept if one is not to fall into the trap of feeling that somehow our own industry is so unique that the lessons learnt in the airline, hotel, BPO, IT or hospital businesses are not applicable to us. If we deal with people, lessons learnt in any industry that have to do with people, apply to us and we would be very foolish to ignore them. Customers and people think holistically. When we experience bad service on board a plane, we compare it quite happily (albeit sometimes unconsciously) to the overall service standard that we are used to in our own environment and feel proportionately bad about it. If we come from a country like Singapore where the quality of service is generally very superior, we will tend to feel highly dissatisfied with bad service. But someone who comes from another country where service standards are generally pretty low, they may find the same service to be acceptable because their expectations are so low to begin with. When experiencing on-board in-flight service, we don’t compare it only to our experience on other airlines. Even people who are flying for the first time feel dissatisfied with poor service. So, lessons are transferable.

Great customer service is a

combination of two things: a genuine desire to serve and some key things to do

(tools). Let us look at each of them.

Attitude: Whenever I think of an attitude

of great customer service I remember when I first went to Singapore in 1994. I

was there to teach a course in teaming skills at GE Asia. I reached my hotel by

about midday and having had lunch and rested, decided to go out in the evening

to see the city. I came out of the hotel and stood at the curbside waiting for

a cab. One came along in less than 2 minutes and then it happened. The driver

pulled up, got out of the car, trotted (he didn’t walk, he trotted) around the

back to where I was, opened the rear passenger door and ushered me into the cab

with a flourish. I realized that I was in the presence of something special and

silently got in.

The interior was spotlessly clean

and smelled of some pleasant mild perfume. I sat waiting for the next act of

the play. And there it was. He said to me as I was sitting in the cab, ‘That is

today’s newspaper for you Sir and some water if you’re thirsty. I hope you are

comfortable.’ I said that I was and thanked him. He shut the door respectfully,

trotted (once again he didn’t walk) back to his seat and said, looking at me in

the rearview mirror, ‘Where can I take you Sir?’ I replied, ‘I don’t want to go

anywhere. I want to just sit here so that I can enjoy the experience of being

in your car.’

I still remember this incident so

many years later as if it happened yesterday. The point is that he was an

ordinary taxi driver who had never gone to a single training class in customer

service. He was in a business where customers commonly have the least

expectation of service and are only interested in not being deceived to pay