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artistic management
mgmt gyan for the MANAGER in you!
Buddha obliged to do so, provided she got him a few mustard seeds from "a family that never encountered death before".
Surprisingly, the lady did try to follow this advise.
She went around searching for mustard seeds from a family that had never encountered death before. As she moved from door to door getting a rejection, it started to dawn upon her that death was a reality that we possibly couldn't escape.
Imagine what would it look like if the conversation proceeded this way:
Lady (crying her heart out): O My Lord, please bring my son back to life.
Buddha: Birth and death are eternal cycles of the nature. Whatever is born has to die.
Lady (crying out even louder): O my son, my poor son, what harm did he do to anybody ... Lord, pleeeeeeeeeeez bring him back to life.
Buddha: The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Day gives way to night and so does night give way to the day...
Lady (crying her soul out): my son ... my poor son ... I want my son back.
Now, people around start whispering: What a stubborn lady. Doesn't even follow Buddha's commands.
Which of these two categories does a modern day manager belong to?
No, you do not have to be Buddha to be a successful manager, but a simple understanding of your team member's psychology could go a long way in solving almost unsolvable problems with relative ease.
The mind follows a certain process of thought and unless you
follow the process, you cannot convince, help, coach or persuade anybody, including yourself. Try telling yourself to feel happy, excited, sad, scared and see if you can feel that. Try imagining the last time you felt extremely successful and you will find excitement
pulsating all through your body.
It only needs a little bit of extra understanding to be a fantastic manager.
Get it wrong and you will blow it.
Get it right and you would have made it.
In the early 80s, executives from US auto companies started making regular
trips to Japan to find out why the Japanese automakers were outperforming
their US counterparts. In an interview, one such executive remarked:
"They didn't show us real plants".
"What makes you think that?," asked the interviewer.
"They had no inventories. I've seen plenty of assembly facilities all my
life. These could not have been real plans. They had fabricated those
plants for the visit."
In a few years, these executives painfully realized how wrong they were.
They had been exposed to a radically different type of "just-in-time"
production system, while they were unprepared for an assembly facility
that didn't have huge piles of inventory.
It is often that you would come across a situation when your world-view
will differ from what actually lies out there in the world. In such
situations, you have two choices:
i) Trim down the reality out there to fit your point of view about the world.
ii) Expand your point of view to include whatever is out there.
MUNCH IT OVER LUNCH!
"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."
Will Rogers
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