The day

Come 17th April -2010 and we all will be set for a mega event celebrating the foundation day and 10th Year anniversary of our company. Everyone who is associated with the company and seen the company growing from handful of people to 100+ people will run high on Sentiments and expectation. It is not an exaggerated forecast of the atmosphere if I find people with wet eyes, heavy hearts, flooded with emotions thinking about the sweet memories and past.

Everyone in the company, including myself have grown leaps and bounds in the past years no matter what profile/role he/she was working with. Right from the office boys to professionals everyone has grown personally and professionally during these years.

In my initial years of career I was working for a web hosting company and was responsible for website development, maintenance and client communication. It was a nice job and I was happy with the job but not satisfied. I was not satisfied because there were very few things to do in terms of experimentation new things and the job had its own limitation of growth.

After working there for 2 years I joined the current organization, the organization being a growing company provided me ample opportunities to explore and do lot of new things, I grabbed and exploited the opportunities to the fullest of my potential.

But still whenever I look back and think, I realize that time has already taken a lead in comparison to my efforts. It’s a race between time and effort; efforts to sustain and grow and to win the race. I feel that time is running very fast and always have a lead, I have not even blinked my eyes and there are lots of things to do yet.

As we are completing a decade of operations, I think that past to present was a pleasant journey and to make “Present to future” a more enjoyable and profitable we need to take some concrete steps and decisions and that's the reason I'm more of looking forward for some concrete announcement and decisions that are long term and will motivate employees to deliver values to the company.

The announcement/ decisions may be regarding new guidelines, policies or regarding the procedures for HR, Operations and other functions of the organization, Policies for recruiting talents, retaining talents and providing opportunity for each and every individual and other best and next practices.

I feel that this is the right opportunity and time to introspect and prepare for the future. I'm running very high on expectation and taken a Mandate provided I'm allowed to do so

"Anything below excellence is an Compromise". I'm sure that you might have heard many of the quality policy but the above policy i wanted to be recognized as Vidhya's Theory"

I’m sure that we will be able to implement best policies and procedure to make this company successful and take it to the top levels.

Thought for the day

Service tax

Can’t we have a simple and single tax mechanism because there are innumerable direct and indirect taxes on corporate and individuals? With an increase in consumer spending, consumers are spending heavily on buying out the services, but a major of those common services are liable for a tax known as service tax.

If we observe minutely than everything under the sun is a service which is being rendered by the individuals or the company in one or other form, farmer cultivating his land is doing a service to the country and society; thank God food grains and vegetables which are foundations to our lives are not covered in service tax.

If there is a service which is paid service and if the customer is utilizing the service after paying for it, then I believe that the customer has virtually bought that service for the time being and it is no more a service instead a commodity till the customer enjoys that service.

Services are perishable; and are to be used within the stipulated time period. In other words they are perishable commodities, The cell number I’m having and the service which I’m subscribed for is a perishable commodity. Service provider can’t assign the number to anyone else till the time I’m using it also the service provider can’t add any number of subscribers in a given spectrum. Then why there is additional burden of service tax on the customer.

Conveyance allowance

Working professionals can claim an 800 INR as an conveyance allowance which is deducted from the net income while filing the income tax return, I was just wondering about the amount one can claim and in which part of country professionals can commute to there workplaces in 800 rupees. Some cities can be treated as exception because those cities have good and ample public transport system.

I think the limit has to be revised and should be based on the salary of the individual who is filing the return otherwise this deduction seems to be a formality and is not conducive.


Image source: http://www.culham.ac.uk

Principle of equality

Equals should be treated equal and unequals unequally, in the proportion to the relevant inequalities; the concept is known as formal principle of equality and was given by Aristotle. Though the application of the principle was more towards health industry but I think that it can be applied to other industries as well.

I came across this principle when I was exploring the ethics is fairness, fairness in corporate world; fairness in terms of providing equal opportunity to the employees, fairness in terms of opportunities to grow and excel.

Fairness in terms of “Equal Opportunity Employer” is a part of mission & vision statement of many companies but many companies miss on this fairness principle.

Fairness is part of company’s culture and has a top to bottom approach. If the leaders are averse to this practice then the company they are leading can’t be an equal opportunity employer. Decision, responsibilities, transparency in decisions and rest all things, virtually everything in the company is governed by favoritism, cronyism, and nepotism.

Favoritism, cronyism, and nepotism all interfere with company’s goals and objectives and have a negative impact in longer run; undermining the common good. Any biasness gives undue advantage to someone who does not necessarily merit the treatment or a position and in such cases when the position is not granted based on the credentials and experience, the service that person renders may be inferior.

Biasness also cause difference of opinions in the team, disengagement and weakens morale of the employee. Leaders should understand that any sort of biasness is not fair and they should not allow it to happen as I mentioned earlier that it is top bottom approach and leaders need to take the first step towards it.

He is the element of She

“Behind every successful man there’s a woman” This is a universal truth and as true as “Sun rises in the east”. On the woman’s day it’s a pleasure and a matter of pride for me to salute the “Woman element” appreciate her role in our life and society and salute them for the contribution.

I’m more than thankful to god because he has blessed me with a loving mother and wife, some of the wonderful colleagues and some good friends in my life, though I’m not blessed with a real sister, but my cousins were more generous to bridge the gap. I also miss the daughter element but no regrets, if life traversed on the growth path, I would certainly go to the adoption centre to have this element close to me - I cherish and nourish this plan within me!!

“Mother” has touched my life and imparted me with a knowledge of distinguishing the good and odds, she has given a direction to my life, shielded me against all odds, punished me whenever it was required. She laid the foundation of my life and whatever I’m today is all because of her and no matter how big I grow I will be always a kid to her.

Wife being a real friend to me from very initial years; right from my childhood, she always encouraged me whenever I was sad and felt defeated. She is an inspiration and acts as a catalyst to balance to my life.

My friends and colleagues who are always with me in my odds and are inspiration in my hard times. They are the people who are straightforward; share/elaborate my shortcomings and suggest me methodologies to improve on them.

Life would have been miserable without all those lovely women who have touched some or other part of my life

image source: http://cantinygamboa.com

Mumbai Special

City of dreams, City never sleeps, City of opportunities; lots of Recognition is associated with the city called “Mumbai”. Whenever I visit Mumbai I feel a lot of energy, enthusiasm and life in the air and the euphoria have its effect on me for next 5-6 days. I usually think that if a visit of 1 day can energize me to that level what might be the energy level of the people who are a part of the Dream City. Hat’s off to the guys.

People in the city are very energetic, hardworking, never tired, very corporative and helpful in nature, and always open for challenges. It’s the only city which can accommodate people from all caste and religion, across the entire socio-economic zone and flood them multiple opportunities to grow. The city always has something or other as a reward for everyone who wants to struggle and survive, exactly like a mother who never has discrimination for her kids and treats them with equality, grooms them up for the challenges and help them in capitalizing the opportunities.

For Mumbai it is said that if a person can survive in Mumbai he can survive in any part of world. This saying again gives me a motherly caring and attitude of the city, the way every mother prepares her kids; strong and robust so that they can survive all the odds of life, the same way the city makes the resident grow strong, robust, energetic and a go-getter.

Every time I’m back from Mumbai, I talk to my family; that I wanted and I should be a part of Mumbai. I want to feel the pace of life, I want to grow faster, I wanted to be in a pool of opportunities and I even wanna my kids to get accustomed to fast pace, understand the opportunities and challenges of life and understand the value of time and money.


I wish and pray for my dreams to come true

images source: http://www.traveljournals.net/

Leadership

The most talked written and discussed topic in management being “leadership and leadership skills”. The reason for the subject getting more popular is being changing business equations, challenges, opportunity and business dynamics. Some argue that this as a born skill while some say that the leadership skills can be developed over a time.

I will buy both the arguments as I think that leadership is an art as well as science. My belief is that Art is something that a person is born with, not everyone is born with an artist within, to support my argument I will quote a real example. I and my brother learned classical form of music, though I have learned the art but I couldn’t achieve command over that on the contrary my bro got command over that, similarly leadership can be learned but the person should have the art from within to be a perfectionist. Mind you this is an example in terms of art; this dosen’t means that a person who can’t play music can’t be a good leader.

I believe that it’s a science as well because any science can be understood, interpreted, groomed & developed with time. So leadership is far above and beyond than what it is understood in general. Many people who consider themselves as leaders without understanding a great deal about it, merely by reading few articles or fantasizing about what great leaders should be.

Leadership generally has two type of power, the legitimate power of the position and the expert power that led to their appointment (may not be true in all the cases). Power being defined as the ability to exert influence over others while authority is the foundation on which that power is built. But power does not necessarily imply a commonly accepted authority, Power of a person depends on how the person is perceived by others, if there is no follower of the person he is no more a leader.

image source: mmipublicrelations.com

What an Idea.!!!

Creativity and innovation are important for the survival of businesses however there exist a slight difference between them

Creativity is more of an “internal” word. It’s subjective, harder to measure and harder to define. It’s more of inward journey on the other hand “Innovative” is an external word. It can be measured. It generally talks about things that have been tested properly and found to have worked in the real world. Creativity is thinking up new things and Innovation is doing new things. In a nutshell

Creativity = Ideas But Innovation = Ideas + Action
Creativity being the subset of Innovation.

However in the name of innovation I have seen leaders throwing hundreds of ideas to there subordinate. This type of leadership is extremely damaging when ideas are out of context and are in an uncontrolled fashion and that too on a day-to-day basis. Fuzzy ideas on a daily basis create a negative impact on people causing confusion, stress, disengagement, lack of trust and fear.

Leaders use fuzziness as a tool to dominate there people, when the target keeps on moving people are on there toes and when things go wrong it becomes easier for them to blame others. These managers don’t really know in which direction to lead their people, so they keep throwing ideas at them and constantly keep on changing the priorities. Mind you generating ideas is easier than following it thoroughly. Innovation without execution is absolutely useless.

As I earlier mentioned that Innovation= Ideas+ action, any new idea has to be discussed (anything that is not discussed remains unclear and un-understood). After discussion, Idea should be selected for execution wherein the execution should be planned, roles and responsibilities should be defined and after all the ground work done, it should go to an implementation stage.

Fuzziness doesn’t breed innovation, rather it kills, when leaders jump from one idea to another, there own ideas doesn’t appear important to them and therefore nobody follow-through them.

Fuzzy leaders take innovation as a shield to protect them, in the name of innovation they keep on fooling themselves and others and in turn causing confusion, stress and fear among the team which in turn hampers the creativity and innovation of the team.