What GJM can start with?

Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM)’s study forum organized two days of seminar on Gorkhaland on 13 and 14 April 2015 at Darjeeling (Bhanu Bhawan). The theme of the seminar was “Creation of Smaller States and its relevance to the demand of Gorkhaland”. Speakers from Telangana, Assam, Delhi, Uttarkhand were flown. Looking at the panel of speakers it appears that GJM wants to get ideas for developing a road map for its fight for the creation of separate state of Gorkhaland.

Lets see the some of the critical suggestions coming from the speakers. (For details see The Darjeeling Chronicle )

1.       Set up a Rashtriya Samity that should include representatives from different walks of life, region, religion and others, and said that the Samity”- Narbhadur Bhandari

2.      Shri. Kesvah Rao Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha, Telengana Rastra Samiti, suggested that the parliament should be made aware of Gorkhaland, start with a voice… Get others to join you.

3.       BJP National Executive Member Tapi Gao,Former Member of Parliament from Arunachal Pradesh ideated ,“Don’t only depend in your MP but expand your influence and contacts in Delhi where it matters. You have 45 elected sabhasads, besides the party’s office bearers. If one is able to catch hold of two MPs in Delhi and is able to convince them about your demand, the Gorkhaland bill will definitely be placed in Parliament. This I am saying as a Gorkhaland demand sympathizer and not a BJP leader,” 

4.      Shri Kashi Singh Airy, President, Uttarakhand Kranti, shared his own experience, “Don't compromise for temporary set-ups. When we were struggling for Uttarakhand... the government tried to make me a Minister so that I would back down... I didn't... they offered us Hill Council... we rejected...in Delhi they arrested he and put me in a hospital... I didn't give in... we never made any compromises in our struggle. The leadership heading the present movement for Gorkhaland must be dedicated and committed. When call was given to unite for Uttarakhand statehood agitation... I set aside my flag of Uttarahand Kranti Dal, and I handed over the leadership to Uttarakhand Sanyuta Samiti... after that all the people of Uttarakhand joined in... from traders to students... from politicians to social workers... everyone united... and we attained our dream of Uttarahand statehood... Why can't you all unite for Gorkhaland? You should"

5.      “Reach out to the adivasis” Dooars Adivasi Leader John Barla

6.      I will ask PM Modi, when will he fulfill his words- the dream of Gorkhas are my dreams, will talk to other MPs for raising this issue in the parliament -Dr. Suramanian Swamy

7.      Article 3 of the Indian Constitution as the easiest route to Gorhaland than Articles 356, 256, 247- Shri. Abhijit Mazumdar, Secretary CPI(ML

8.      “If Dooars is merged with other areas in Gorkhaland, then the role of Adivasi leaders should be at the forefront…. more than the Gorkhas who are in minority... The adivasi leadership should show us the way... The Gorkhas must extend their help to Adivasis...” Shri. SN Pradhan, Dooars Study Forum

The suggestions Sounds good and doable. From this discourse what GJM should do if they really mean business:

1.      Dissolve Gorkha Territorial Administration (GTA) and start the movement with a single point agenda of Formation of Gorkhaland

2.      Bring all the political outfits from the hills and Dooars under one umbrella with a single purpose “to fight for the creation of Gorkhaland”. You can fight politically once state is formed.

3.      Form a lobby group with the members from academia, business, media, policy makers to lobby with the political parties in the centre  like Congress, SP, JD(U), BJP etc

These are the starting point and the fundamentals without which future strategies will remain in limbo. Is GJM leadership ready to take up the challenge? Will they be able to accommodate other political, non-political, intelligentsia from Hills and Terai & Dooars in the fight for the statehood for Gorkhaland? Will they be able to forego the power gained from GTA? If yes then Gorkhaland is very certain and the words of speakers that “Gorkhaland is possible” will be a reality otherwise Gorkhaland is a distant reality as I had shared earlier too (Read What Darjeeling needs now is development).

Organised farmers' forum for agriculture development in the Darjeeling hill

40% of the area in Darjeeling hill falls under village which means 40% of the land can be cultivated, 22%  are covered under tea plantation and 38% of it are under forest. Agriculture is one of the major source of economic development of the people of the hills.
Agriculture being major source of economic development still do not show any growth. The farmers face the problems of poor irrigation, no access to credits, access to market is still a dream for majority of the farmers, Farmers still adopt the traditional farming methods, cost of input is higher than the output as the productivity is decreasing day by day. On my interactions with farmers I found that soi health has not been done till now and almost all the farmers (51 of them) have never attended any training on agriculture forget about the agriculture loan.
One of the ways farmers can develop agriculture in the hills is through organised farmers' forum. Till now farmers re involved in solo farming. They are least connected and the result is shown in their lack of awareness, lack of knowledge n scientific know how etc. If farmers can come together and engage themselves in organized manner many of the basic problems, from procurement of seed to selling of their produce, they face today can be solved.
Farmers' forum can act in the following framework:

1. Capability development
2. Networking/ linkage
3. Asset mobilization and use
4. Business/ market development and reach

After Telangana it is the turn of Gorkhaland - Mahendra P Lama

By Prof Mahendra P Lama

After Telangana - It is our turn now

The UPA partners and Congress Working Committee’s decision to carve out a new state of Telangana is a welcome move for the people of Darjeeling district and Dooars. The UPA Government deserves our warmest congratulations for setting new trends and norms in the formation of the state. Firstly, this is for the first time in the recent constitutional history of India that a new constituent state is being created without the effective resolution by the concerned State Assembly. This augurs very well for a separate state in Darjeeling and Dooars.

Secondly, the Congress Party has now started rethinking about restructuring the federal structure of the country and looked into the larger aspirations of the people who were left out in the reorganization of states in the 1950s. This means it is also adhering to the path set by the NDA government when it created Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh in 2000.

And thirdly, the Congress Party is now willing to consider similar other demands on “merit basis”.

The demand for a separate statehood comprising of Darjeeling district and Dooars is perhaps the oldest non-fulfilled demand and movement in the 20th – 21st century political history of India. Two rounds of protracted and violent movements took place starting 1985 and ending 2012, yet this issue has not figured in the political spectrums and corridor of power in New Delhi.

Interestingly during this period of 27 years four new states have already been created and not in Darjeeling and Dooars.

Demand for separate statehood in Darjeeling District and Dooars are a much more comprehensive demand and historically rather powerful. This has three key elements in the core of the demand.
Firstly, it is the imminent need to consolidate the national security as this geo-politically sensitive region has four international borders viz with Bangladesh, Bhutan, China and Nepal and a key corridor known as ‘chicken neck’ that links North East region with the rest of India. A separate state here will take care of so many national security concerns that exist in this region.

Secondly, the prime need to conserve and promote the identity of the communities including the Gorkhas, Bhutias, Lepchas, Adivasis, Rajbonshis and several other religious and linguistic minorities.
Thirdly, the extreme deprivations and backwardness of this region despite being one of the most resourceful geographies which need to be instantly corrected. Look at the conditions of our natural resources today. How do we account for so many hunger deaths in the tea gardens of Dooars, where are the traditional and modern institutions gone ? Why the people of Siliguri, Dooars and Darjeeling be subjected to such poor work cultures and why we should remain alienated from the national and global mainstream ? In fact in the new state we shall be one of the most developed states in the country.

And finally, the traditional harmony, peace and collective survival that prevail among the people in the hills and plains including among the Gorkhas, Bengalis, Biharis, Marwaris, Adivasis and Kamtapuris and various religions and communities need to be further consolidated.

The separate state with Darjeeling district and Dooars could benefit the nation, West Bengal and Sikkim, Bihar and all the neighbouring states in the North East region in many very many ways. The sub-division like Siliguri and the people therein will flourish as this will become the entrepot for the entire trading and commercial activities of a scale that is unbelievable. The regulated land border trading in the four international borders itself will bring fortunes to thousands of our children.

The younger generation will benefit from the large scale generation of new varieties of employment including in government, private and non-governmental sectors. For instance, how many IAS, IPS and IFS officers have we produced from Darjeeling district and Dooars in the 66 years of post independence India ? Given the fact that we have the best educational institutions in the country which once catered to the building of Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sikkim, north east regions and many other parts of the country, the question remains as why we could not produce these officers, technocrats, professionals, businessmen, industrialists, academics and even politicians like what other states have done?

The separate state will bring handsome benefits to all its residents and people and communities regardless of language, castes, creed, religion and locations which the present state of West Bengal cannot even think of providing. Our children have higher aspirations, they need much more space and institutions for their intellectual, physical and material growth which the present Government cannot provide at all.

A Bengali will be the Chief Minister of this new state, an Adivasi will be the Home Minister, a Rajbongshi will be the Education Minister, a Gorkha will be the Finance Minister, a Marwari will be the Commerce Minister and a Bihari will be the Energy Minister. Our children will get into central civil services, they will teach in our central university and Indian Institute of Technology and Indian Institute of Management in our new state. Our women folks will have huge playing fields where they could be members in the state assembly, parliament and also in several institutions.

We shall have another All India Institute of Medical Sciences and several other technical and professional institutions that will take care of our health problems, education, cultural-social needs, farmers and agriculture, music, fine art and literary activities, and tea gardens and cinchona plantations, climate change and natural disasters, traditional medicinal system and natural resources.
We shall have the best of investors from both India and abroad coming to this region for investment. If the British companies came to the hills of Darjeeling and Dooars in the 19th century why not American, Korean, Japanese and German companies today to invest in tourism projects, water resources, horticulture and floriculture and software development. Our children from Chopra, Phansidewa, Siliguri, Panightta, Bagrakot, Kalchini, Jaigaon, Sonada, Pedong, Mirik and Rimbik will be civil servants, engineers, doctors, chartered accountants, architects, teachers and environmentalists. There will be no dearth of employment and the future will be alive and bright.

Our NGOs will get connected with various Ministries and funding agencies in the country and also with major development agencies including with the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, United Nations agencies and other philanthropic institutions like Ford, Bill Gates, Aga Khan and Macarthur Foundations. All the central government projects, some of which we have not heard the names also, will smoothly and automatically flow to us. Our three-tier Panchayats with the at least Seven Zilla Parishads will actually govern the entire rural areas of our State.

Any political parties including Congress, BJP, CPM, RSP, GJMM, CPRM and Trinamool Congress could form the Government in this new and flourishing state. Any political ideology and all the communities will collectively flourish and bloom in this new State. There will be several languages as official and semi-official languages including the Bhutia, Lepcha, Nepali, Bengali and Hindi.
We must appreciate the huge sacrifice made by Shri Bimal Gurung from resigning the post of Chairman of the Gorkha Territorial Administration (GTA). He has been leading the movement for the separate state for last six years and knows the complexities in the negotiation process. We should also fondly recall the protracted movement made by the GNLF led by Shri Subash Ghising in 1980s and contributions made by several leaders in the past like Dambar Singh Gurung, Madan Tamang, Ananda Pathak, RB Rai, Biren Bose, Theodre Manen, Mayadevi Chettri, Kanu Sanyal, Charu Majumdar, Birsa Tirkee, Gopal Maitra, Khudiram Pahan, Dawa Norbula, Maitryi Bose, PP Rai, Ratanlal Brahmin, KB Chhetri, SP Lepcha, LM Prodhan and several other leaders from Siliguri and Dooars in highlighting our plights and alienations.

We should pay our tribute to the hundreds of people who sacrificed their lives for a separate state and thousands of people who lost their home and hearth in the search for a separate state. Media played a very critical role and must thank persons like Subhas Talukdar, Shiva Kumar Rai, Sunanda Datta Ray, Tushar Kanti Ghosh, BD Basnet, Kumar Pradhan, MB Rai, DP Sharma, Dilip Bose and the present set of eminent newspapers like Himalaya Darpan, Dainik Jagran, Uttarbanga Sambad, Hamro Prajashakti, Telegraph, Statesman, Janpath and many others both in Bengal and at the national level.

Given that a separate state in this region is going to be a reality and GJMM is the party with a strong support base, Shri Bimal Gurung and his party; other national and regional political parties and all the people of the Siliguri, Dooars, Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Kurseong together have to now make four critical interventions.

Firstly, we should bring all the political parties and socio-cultural organizations from the hills and the plains to a common platform to provide more effective direction and more powerful voice to the demand for this new state. The brain and muscle power must work together.

Secondly, we should build a strong team in Calcutta and Delhi that will intellectually and politically influence the Parliament, Assembly, media, political parties, bureaucracy and civil society. The other political parties that are working for separate states like Harit Pradesh, Vidharva and Bodoland must be brought under the fold. The Telangana experience shows that ultimately it is Delhi which really matters in deciding the creation of a new state.

Thirdly, we should provide a clear road map to the formation of this new State and also lay out a comprehensive structure of the state, its likely programme and planning that would mention how people, communities and various locations in the hills and plains will be benefitted by this separate state.

And fourthly, we should also very clearly provide a long term vision of how our nation and other states in the country including West Bengal will benefit from a separate state like ours.

After the formation of Telangana, it is our turn to have our own separate state. The nation and the people feel like this. And this is the aspiration of our people in the hills and plains of Darjeeling district and Dooars.

The capitalist manifesto

Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries. By Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya.PublicAffairs; 290 pages; $28.99 and £19.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukFrom The Economist
INDIA needs more market liberalisation to promote economic growth. A few years ago, with its economy expanding at an annual rate of nearly 10%, there was talk of India one day rivalling China, or even overtaking it. But policymakers have grown complacent. They assumed rapid growth would continue, but did nothing to foster it. The result is that India now putters on at less than half what it could achieve. Investors are anxious and the politicians are bickering.
In their new book Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, both economics professors at Columbia University, outline a series of measures to boost growth. “Why Growth Matters” is a blunt book; almost a manifesto for policymakers and analysts. It explains how rapid expansion has brought India immense gains, and why more change is needed—and needed soon. Both men are champions of globalisation and they hope their ideas will stiffen the resolve of India’s leaders.
What they have to say is convincing. Increasing growth rates over the past couple of decades lifted some 200m Indians out of poverty. That is an immense gain. In 1978, say the authors, more than half of all Indians were below the poverty line; today it is roughly a fifth. Gradually even those politicians who put their trust mostly in redistribution and the early roll-out of welfare grasp that a bigger economy means more resources to share around. Read More

Beyond bootstraps

An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions. By Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze. Allen Lane; 434 pages; £20. To be published in America in August by Princeton University Press; $29.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

From The Economist
AS A conundrum it could hardly be bigger. Six decades of laudably fair elections, a free press, rule of law and much else should have delivered rulers who are responsive to the ruled. India’s development record, however, is worse than poor. It is host to some of the world’s worst failures in health and education. If democracy works there, why are so many Indian lives still so wretched?
Amassive blackout last summer caught global attention, yet 400m Indians had (and still have) no electricity. Sanitation and public hygiene are awful, especially in the north: half of all Indians still defecate in the open, resulting in many deaths from diarrhoea and encephalitis. Polio may be gone, but immunisation rates for most diseases are lower than in sub-Saharan Africa. Twice as many Indian children (43%) as African ones go hungry.
Many adults, especially women, are also undernourished, even as obesity and diabetes spread among wealthier Indians. Despite gains, extreme poverty is rife and death in childbirth all too common. Prejudice kills on an immense scale: as many as 600,000 fetuses are aborted each year because they are female. Compared even with its poorer neighbours, Bangladesh and Nepal, India’s social record is unusually grim.
“An Uncertain Glory”, an excellent but unsettling new book by two of India’s best-known development economists, Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, sets out how and why this is so. They argue that Indian rulers have never been properly accountable to the needy majority. Belgian-born Mr Drèze has lived in India since 1979 and became an Indian citizen in 2002. Now at Allahabad University in the north, he is influential among Indian policymakers, particularly for pushing a right-to-information law. Mr Sen, a Nobel laureate, now at Harvard, famously showed how famines have never happened in democracies. The two men want a debate on India’s social failures and how to fix them. Read More

Amartya Sen on Narendra Modi

Pro-poor or pro-poverty?

By Chetan Bhagat

Poverty is a terrible thing. There are few things as demeaning to a human being as not having the means to fulfil his basic needs in life.
India is one of the poverty havens of the world. We have all heard of India's teeming millions, probably since childhood. While one could blame the British for all our mistakes pre-1947, it has been almost 67 years since they left. We are still one of the poorest nations on earth. Many countries in Asia, which started with similar poverty levels in the 1940s, have progressed faster — some of them dramatically. We, however, remain poor.
The continuance of poverty is particularly surprising because there are so many smart and powerful people who claim to be representing the poor. Politicians, academics, poverty economists, NGOs — there are so many people trying to help the poor. It is baffling, then, why we can't seem to get rid of poverty. Our public debates are virtually controlled by left-leaning intellectuals, who are some of the most pro-poor people on earth. And yet, they seem to be get-ting nowhere.
Well, they won't. Because while they may be experts on the poor and their suffering, they have little idea about the one thing that eventually removes poverty — money. Yes, it is over-simplistic, but it is perplexing how little our top thinkers and debate-controllers know about wealth creation, true economic empowerment, productivity and competitiveness. For, if they did, they would not support one of the most hare-brained schemes to have ever come out of our illusionist politicians` hat — the food security Bill. Read More

You Can't Predict Who Will Change The World

By Nassim Taleb
Before the discovery of Australia, Europeans thought that all swans were white, and it would have been considered completely unreasonable to imagine swans of any other color. The first sighting of a black swan in Australia, where black swans are, in fact, rather common, shattered that notion. The moral of this story is that there are exceptions out there, hidden away from our eyes and imagination, waiting to be discovered by complete accident. What I call a “Black Swan” is an exceptional unpredictable event that, unlike the bird, carries a huge impact.
It’s impossible to predict who will change the world, because major changes are Black Swans, the result of accidents and luck. But we do know who society’s winners will be: those who are prepared to face Black Swans, to be exposed to them, to recognize them when they show up and to rigorously exploit them.
Read more here

Inside Brains of Winners

Everyone knows a name dropper when they hear one. Buzz names like Gates, Jiwei, Jobs, Nooyi, Zuckerberg and Winfrey can give dramatic pause to a conversation and pique collegial interest. But their mere mention can also throw a name dropper under the credibility bus quicker than they can say “My cousin was college roommates with J.K. Rowling’s agent’s sister.”

If you’re in the know, you’ve already gathered that success is more about the brain than ever before. Cognitive neuroscience has revealed and continues to expose the incredible capacities of the human brain, particularly as they relate to success and optimization. When it comes to your professional reputation, having others chatting it up about your super successful brain should be the goal. Here are four brain strategies that people who consistently grasp success claim as their own—and you can, too.

First, develop an Opportunity Radar. An Opportunity Radar is a successful person’s ability to recognize non-traditional paths or circumstances leading to positive outcomes. How do you do that? Make sacrifices to be in the right place at the right time, don’t let your confidence rest only in your salary, don’t just think outside of the box—create your own boxes, some of which you may never use, but that’s OK. You can either stand around in long line to ride the success Ferris Wheel, or figure out how you can build your own thrilling ride by finding the right non-traditional opportunity. Of course, getting on that wild ride may take some nerve. Truly successful brains have risk management figured out to a degree as well. Read on.

You’ll need to calibrate your Optimal Risk Gauge. Successful people know when and how to take risk and they most likely learned much of what they know about risk by doing things the hard way. We’re not just talking entrepreneurial risk, but all kinds of risks: time, relationships, financial, creative. Research amply explains that too little or too much risk leads to dissatisfying failure, but a moderate level of risk appropriately challenges us so we remain motivated, confident, and leave plenty of room for gaining knowledge and insight while we avoid stagnation. That means you‘ll need to find comfort outside of your comfort zone, take inventory of your risk and avoidance patterns, and closely examine what you believe about yourself and your ability to rebound when a plan fails. Are you a renegade or an ostrich? What if you’re new at taking risks altogether? Don’t panic. If you’ve got room for professional growth, knowledge and skill, you’re still positioned well to reach success.

Your Talent Meter, the third factor, will help you unfold a critical part of your success story. You’ve got to have talent, regardless of how you get it. What is sadder than sad is someone believing they’re doing a particular task well and in reality, they aren’t even coming close to being competent (think “American Idol” audition reel here). Academia refers to this pitiful insight as the Dunning-Kruger effect, also known as the Double Whammy of Incompetence. Accomplished people have lively Talent Meters that are always assessing their knowledge and skills, informing them about their success potential from day to day. Knowing your strengths, but even more importantly knowing your weaknesses and not fearing them, is vital to your success. In business world circles, it can be a career-branding faux pas to affiliate with failure, lacking knowledge, or skill deficits. That said, those people who embrace success consistently have their Talent Meters turned on 24/7. They are constantly learning, gathering information, watching for mentors, practicing, reading and rereading, evaluating personal and professional insufficiencies, and fearlessly doing something about all of them when they turn up on the short end of the talent stick. Even better, successful brains will still have room left to spare once they are jammed with new information and skills.

Speaking of information, it’s common to hear the expression of being on “information overload.” To meet with success, your brain needs a Focus Laser, the fourth critical ingredient to a science-focused, success-attaining strategy recipe. A Focus Laser defines much of what your brain is about: attention, intention, motivation, distraction. Successful people are able to use their brains to lock onto a goal in the future and not let other factors distract them from it. Culturally, we could also say we are on “opportunity overload” and fear missing out on something that could possibly be life-changing, even if we don’t know what it is yet. The successful brain stays focused. That means saying no to oncoming opportunities unless they relate to the goal, reducing your commitment load at work and home when possible, learning a prioritization system based on your goal


and personal value systems (and use it), sticking relatively close to budgets, and throw multitasking out the window because your brain isn’t wired for it.

Research is handing over the owner’s manual to our brain at a robust pace, one section at a time. Let’s admit it, name droppers like to talk about their latest e-gadget, but they’ll be talking about your most efficient gadget once you start using it to its fullest. The best part? You already own it—your brain.

Dr. Jeff Brown is an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School, and the co-author of “The Winner’s Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success.” His website iswww.DrJeffBrown.com.

Source:Wall Street Journal

Bono: The good news on poverty (Yes, there's good news)

The Strategic Plan is Dead. Long Live Strategy.

By Dana O’Donovan & Noah Rimland Flower | 7 | Jan. 10, 2013
Source: Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR)

Take a moment and read these two words: strategic plan. Now close your eyes and picture one. If what comes up is a thick binder, gathering dust on a shelf next to other thick binders from five and ten years past, you’re not alone. We believe that a better understanding of the history of strategy and what caused the demise of binder-bound strategic planning can point the way to re-inventing strategy for the world we live in today. It is important to remember that strategy’s roots are military. Military strategy focuses on setting objectives, collecting intelligence, and then using that intelligence to make informed decisions about how to achieve your objectives—take that hill, cut this supply line.

Historically, the battlefield was a place where you could count on a few constants:
The past was a good predictor of the future. There were years or decades between meaningful shifts in the basic variables, such as the power of a soldier’s weapons or the range of aircraft.
Good data was scarce and hard to come by. Scouts and spies had to risk their lives to find and relay information, and had to be ever on the lookout for enemy deception.
Lines of communication were unreliable at best. Small numbers of clear directives were a tactical imperative.

Not surprisingly, after a couple of millennia, military strategy became well adapted to these constraints.

After World War II, when military strategy came into the business world as strategic planning, so did these constraints. As a result, strategic planners focused on predicting the future based on historic trend lines; invested heavily in gathering all available data; and produced a small number of directives issued from the top, for the rest of the organization to execute.

This approach to strategic planning was a reasonably good fit for much of the business world from the fifties through the eighties. But with the rise of high-tech tools and increased globalization in the nineties, the world began to change, and now it looks quite different indeed. The future is no longer reasonably predictable based on the past—in fact, it is liable to be startlingly different. Good data is easy to access and cheap to acquire. Communication is rapid, indiscriminate, and constant.

The world has become a more turbulent place, where anyone with a new idea can put it into action before you can say “startup” and launch widespread movements with a single Tweet. This has left organizational leaders with a real problem, since the trusted, traditional approach to strategic planning is based on assumptions that no longer hold. The static strategic plan is dead.

This has led to increasingly polarized attitudes about the value of having a strategy at all. Some leaders are valiantly trying to save strategic planning by urging us to focus even more on rigorous data analysis. Others deny the value of strategy, arguing that organizations need agility above all else (an attitude that famed strategist Roger Martin reports hearing with increasing frequency).

We think that what is necessary today is a strategy that breaks free of static plans to be adaptive and directive, that emphasizes learning and control, and that reclaims the value of strategic thinking for the world that now surrounds us. Martin acknowledged this point at the Skoll World Forum in 2010 when he said: “Every model is wrong and every strategy is wrong. Strategy in a way helps you learn what is ‘righter’. People think you can prove a strategy in advance. You can’t.”

The approach we developed in working with our clients at Monitor Institute is what we call adaptive strategy. We create a roadmap of the terrain that lies before an organization and develop a set of navigational tools, realizing that there will be many different options for reaching the destination. If necessary, the destination itself may shift based on what we learn along the way.

Creating strategies that are truly adaptive requires that we give up on many long-held assumptions. As the complexity of our physical and social systems make the world more unpredictable, we have to abandon our focus on predictions and shift into rapid prototyping and experimentation so that we learn quickly about what actually works. With data now ubiquitous, we have to give up our claim to expertise in data collection and move into pattern recognition so that we know what data is worth our attention. We also know that simple directives from the top are frequently neither necessary nor helpful. We instead find ways to delegate authority, get information directly from the front lines, and make decisions based on a real-time understanding of what’s happening on the ground. Instead of the old approach of “making a plan and sticking to it,” which led to centralized strategic planning around fixed time horizons, we believe in “setting a direction and testing to it,” treating the whole organization as a team that is experimenting its way to success.

This approach wouldn’t surprise anyone in the world of current military strategy. Recent generations of military thinkers have long since moved beyond the traditional approach, most notably famed fighter pilot John Boyd. He saw strategy as a continuous mental loop that ran from observe to orient to decide and finally to act, returning immediately to further observation. By adopting his mindset (with a particular emphasis on the two O’s, given our turbulent context), we can get much better at making strategy a self-correcting series of intentional experiments.

To provide structure to this fluid approach, we focus on answering a series of four interrelated questions about the organization’s strategic direction: what vision you want to pursue, how you will make a difference, how you will succeed, and what capabilities it will take to get there.

The skills and mindset for today’s strategic planning will come from continuously asking ourselves these questions about our organizations, programs, and initiatives. Once we accept Dwight D. Eisenhower’s sage advice that “Plans are useless, but planning is everything,” we will be ready to adapt to whatever curveballs the twenty-first century sees fit to throw.

Dana O’Donovan (@DanaODonovan) is the COO of Monitor Institute and is fascinated by the border between strategy and execution, where seemingly incremental changes in day-to-day behavior can enable individuals, organizations and collectives to achieve breakthrough social change. Her consulting practice at Monitor Institute focuses on identifying opportunities, developing strategy, designing organizational and activity systems, helping organizations learn, and facilitating groups through periods of transition.

Noah Rimland Flower (@MntrInstitute) works with leaders to achieve large-scale social change through new uses of collaboration, networks, and technology. Over close to a decade of work at Monitor he has combined consulting and research to develop new strategies on issues including education reform, healthy food systems, and climate change.

Thick problems, thin solutions. — Michael Edwards on NGOs bridging the gap

The rapidly changing world leaves us with more complex, politicised and unpredictable problems. These stem from a number of issues such as growth, equity, sustainability, justice and others. Independent writer and activist Michael Edwards characterises these problems as ‘thick’ and describes the solutions being found as increasingly ‘thinner’.
He suggests that “the solutions promoted by most development agencies are getting ‘thinner’ by the day”, as currently they are ”fixated on speed, growth, numbers and material success; dominated by technology and other ‘magic bullets;’ framed by a philosophy that reduces human values to the competitive culture of the market; and aimed at increased participation in unsustainable economies and polities that are incapable of reconciling different interests”.
However, he does not dismiss thin solutions as irrelevant nor does he view thick problems as insoluble, “just complicated, requiring a conscious effort to link the concrete actions that NGOs support to the broader shifts that give them more long-term influence and impact”.
Altogether, in his article Michal Edwards explores four main issues: “why are problems getting ‘thicker’? Why are solutions getting ‘thinner?’ How can NGOs help to bridge the gap? And what should they strengthen and phase out in order to play this role effectively?”
You can read the entire article, “Thick Problems and Thin Solutions, How NGOs Can Bridge The Gap”, published by Hivos, member of Eurostep, on the former’s website: Hivos

Killer strategies by Gary Hamel

(FORTUNE Magazine June 23, 1997) – Ask Nike CEO Phil Knight what he likes to do best, and he doesn't hesitate a beat--he likes to break things. Back in the 1960s, he turned the sleepy footwear industry upside down by betting that joggers would be willing to pay a premium for high-quality running shoes. Then, in the 1980s, he transformed his successful athletic shoe company into a marketing machine, saturating the airwaves with radical commercials that emphasized emotion rather than the product. Now, with the traditional sneaker market getting tougher, he's turning Nike into a sports behemoth that manages events like golf tournaments while it peddles both equipment and apparel.
Nike's stock has been on a roller coaster lately. But over the years, Knight's iconoclastic behavior has paid off for shareholders. Since 1986, Nike stock has posted 47% average annual gains. With returns like that, Knight is part of the most exclusive club in corporate America. Between 1986 and 1996, just 17 companies of the FORTUNE 1,000 grew total shareholder return by 35% or more per year. Their secret? When you dig into the workings of these wealth creators, you find that most managed to grow their return rates by radically changing the basis of competition in their industries. They either invented totally new industries or completely reinvented existing industries.

This is true not only for Nike but for Home Depot, Amgen, Intel, Compaq, Harley-Davidson, Champion Enterprises, and nearly all the others on our superstar list (see table). For instance, back in the 1980s, Harley-Davidson CEO Richard Teerlink had the notion that he was running far more than just a motorcycle company; he turned his operation into a business that sells American nostalgia--and it worked. Amgen's Gordon Binder broke all the rules of the biotech industry by focusing his genetic research not on customers but on the best science money could buy. The result: a 68% average annual total return over the past ten years, the best performance of all FORTUNE 1,000 companies.

Even companies like Coca-Cola and GE, which look like they are winning by execution alone, are also changing the rules in subtle ways. For instance, Coke has dramatically reconfigured its global bottling operation to give the company substantially more distribution and marketing oomph: Over 30% of Coke's global business is now in the hands of nine key bottlers in which the company has an equity stake.

Taking risks, breaking the rules, and being a maverick have always been important, but today they are more crucial than ever. We live in a discontinuous world--one where digitalization, deregulation, and globalization are profoundly reshaping the industrial landscape. What we see is a dramatic proliferation of new economic life forms: virtual organizations, global consortia, Net-based commerce, ad infinitum. Inevitably, the economic sea change now under way will drive an extraordinary amount of wealth creation over the next few decades--just as the move from the agrarian economy to the industrial economy generated enormous new wealth around the last turn of the century. But just who will capture the new wealth? On the road to the future, who will be the windshield, and who will be the bug?

Unless today's established corporations learn to reinvent themselves and their industries, much of the new wealth will be created by newcomers. Today's CEOs are instinctively aware of this hard truth. In an MCI/Gallup survey of 55O U.S. CEOs, 38% said that industry newcomers--not traditional competitors--had taken the best advantage of change over the past ten years. When asked how the newcomers had succeeded, fully 62% of those polled said they had profoundly changed the rules of the game. Only 31% thought the newcomers had won through better execution. Finally, most of the corporate leaders surveyed thought that in ten years' time the toughest competitors they would face would be newcomers rather than the same old same old. This suggests that corporate leaders are painfully aware that incumbency ain't what it used to be.

While most of today's leaders know they must change the rules of the game, few understand how to create a revolution in their own companies. Assuming Phil Knight can't be hired away from Nike, the only alternative is to unleash the spirit of strategy innovation. I define strategy innovation as the ability to reinvent the basis of competition within existing industries and to invent entirely new industries. It will be the next fundamental competitive advantage for companies around the world. In an increasingly nonlinear world, only nonlinear strategies will create substantial new wealth.

And more companies are proving the point all the time. Who has been creating new wealth in the American grocery business? Though companies like Procter & Gamble, Kroger, and other traditional leaders have created a lot of new value in the past decade, industry revolutionaries like Boston Market, Starbucks Coffee, Trader Joe's, Petco, ConAgra, and Wal-Mart have created even more. While the old guard in the grocery industry has been focusing efforts on rationalizing the supply chain and turning out thousands of almost trivial product-line extensions, the vanguard has been creating entirely new product categories and retailing concepts. Starbucks, for instance, took a sleepy supermarket commodity--coffee--and began selling it in infinite varieties in trendy stores, thereby establishing a whole new market.

Who is going to create the new wealth in the auto industry? Unless they develop new strategies, it probably won't be GM, Ford, Nissan, Chrysler, or their traditional dealers but instead the new megadealers such as CarMax, Auto-By-Tel, AutoNation USA, and Driver's Mart--companies that are reinventing the retailing and distribution of the auto industry from the customer backward. With AutoNation USA, for instance, CEO Wayne Huizenga hopes to do for autos what McDonald's did for hamburgers: consolidate the industry by creating a national brand.

Take another example. Between April 1995 and April 1996, the capitalization of Internet-related companies rose from near zero to almost $10 billion. Yahoo and Netscape are just two of the new Net-exploiting value generators. True, it's not clear whether companies like these will continue to thrive in this volatile industry. But it seems unlikely that much of this new Internet-related value will be captured by traditional computer industry players like Unisys, Computer Sciences Corp., or Fujitsu.

Let me throw out a proposition: We have reached the end of incrementalism in the quest to create new wealth. Quality, cost, time-to-market, process improvement--these are important, but we are hitting the point of diminishing returns. Ford may be able to take another hour or two out of vehicle assembly time--its Japanese competitors may force it to do so. But if new companies totally reinvent the retailing and service of new and used automobiles, Ford's incremental improvements won't count for much. Neither will share buybacks, demergers, process reengineering, or downsizing lead to new wealth creation. At best, they simply keep profits from eroding. They may prolong the lives of geriatric strategies and anachronistic companies, but they won't create new business, new revenue streams, and new wealth.

Now here's the conundrum: If an innovative strategy drives wealth creation, then why isn't the pursuit of such a strategy front and center in most organizations today? In the MCI/Gallup poll, for instance, a majority of CEOs said that the strategies of their major competitors had become more alike over the past few years rather than more dissimilar. With the strategies of market leaders converging in many industries, it's no wonder many companies are feeling the heat of "hypercompetition." While speed and agility are central to corporate success, they're not enough. To escape, even temporarily, this kind of trench warfare, you need to break the rules of your industry, and that isn't easy. It takes leaders who question conventional wisdom:

Myth: Industry analysis is key to strategy. The rule breakers know that it is now increasingly difficult to define precisely where an industry begins and ends. This is certainly true for financial services, telecommunications, health care, and a variety of other industries. The question, "What industry are you in?" is becoming harder and harder to answer.

Myth: You should focus on your direct competitors. In the past it was relatively easy to tell who was a competitor and who was not. Today it is harder to distinguish competitors from collaborators from suppliers from buyers. The rule breakers understand that rivalry ain't as simple as it used to be. For many companies, it's getting harder and harder to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

Myth: In strategy, it's you against the world. Most managers think they can pretty much control the direction of their business. Yet today's smart leaders understand it is difficult to know just where the boundaries of the firm begin and end--temporary workers, outsourcing, and long-term supply relationships are now the norm. A firm may "own" only a small portion of the relevant value chain. The sort of radical strategy that leads to true innovation becomes substantially more complex in a world where the firm doesn't directly control many of the assets critical to its success.

Knowing that today's world works differently is important but not sufficient. You actually have to know how to create unconventional wealth strategies in your company. Surprisingly, the strategy industry--all those consultants, gurus, and planners--doesn't know how. Of course, everyone knows a strategy once they see one--be it Microsoft's, Nucor's, or Virgin Atlantic's. Anyone can recognize a great strategy after the fact. We also understand planning as a "process." The only problem is that process doesn't produce strategy--it produces plans. The dirty little secret of the strategy industry is that it doesn't have any theory of strategy creation. Whenever we come across a brilliantly successful strategy, we are all inclined to ask, "Was it luck, or was it foresight? Did these guys have this thing all figured out, or did they just stumble into success?"

A key thing to remember is that truly innovative strategies are always, and I mean always, the result of lucky foresight. Foresight, however, doesn't emerge in a sterile vacuum; it emerges in the fertile loam of experience, coincident trends, unexpected conversations, random musings, career detours, and unfulfilled aspirations. But the question remains, can we do anything to increase the fertility of the soil out of which strategy grows? Can we make serendipity happen? Or at least encourage it? I think so.

One good place to start is to develop a deep theory of strategy creation. It's clear that strategizing isn't a "thing," and neither is it a process. Instead, it must be a deeply embedded capability--a way of understanding what's really going on in your industry, turning it on its head, and then envisioning the new opportunities that fall out.

Strategizing is not a once-a-year rain dance, nor is it a once-a-decade consulting project. Strategizing must be a skill as deeply embedded as total quality, cycle-time reduction, or customer service. Just as business processes can be reinvented in ways big and small, so too can business models. This is how new wealth gets created.

Here are five ways organizations can radically rethink their missions:

New voices. Companies miss the future not because they are fat or lazy but because they are blind. That blindness is a genetic blindness. Land is a mystery to fish--fish are not genetically equipped to understand land. And by the time fish learn about land it is often too late. Many companies are genetically unequipped to see where the future is coming from. A lack of genetic diversity makes it difficult for companies to first encompass and then exploit the various trends and discontinuities that could be leveraged to create new wealth.

New voices, i.e., new genetic material, must be brought into the strategy process. Diversity was a requirement for the development of life; so too is it a requirement for the emergence of new strategy. A journalist recently asked me if I thought IBM had a chance of leading the next stage of the information revolution, as it had led at an earlier stage. I said that to render such a judgment, I would need to know how many of IBM's top 100 executives had grown up on the West Coast of America--where the future of the computer industry is being created--and how many of them were, at the present time, under 40 years of age. If a quarter, or a third, of the senior group were under 40 and possessed of a West Coast perspective on the information industry, then there was certainly hope for IBM. But the point was clear: IBM will need new voices contributing to its strategy if it is to reclaim intellectual leadership in the info biz. To IBM's credit, it has substantially diversified the ranks of top management over the past few years. It is a far more genetically diverse place than it was five years ago.

New conversations. Strategy depends not only on a diversity of voices but on the connections between those voices as well. For strategy to emerge, we need new conversations--conversations that cross the boundaries of function, technology, hierarchy, business, and geography. One thing is certain: If for five or six years in a row the same ten or 15 people in a company have the same conversations about strategy in the same way, new insights will be unlikely to emerge. Strategizing depends on creating a rich and complex web of conversations that cut across previously isolated pockets of knowledge and create new and unexpected combinations of insight.

Not all talking and listening amounts to deep conversation. For a meaningful conversation to occur, the participants must create some common context--they must, to a degree, "invade each other's worlds." This takes time. Conversations cannot be hurried. Conversations cannot be tightly scripted. They certainly cannot be shoehorned into the typical planning process or a two-day strategy "retreat" at a posh hotel.

We often lament the fact that it takes so long for a new strategy to rise through the layers of a bureaucratic organization to the level of management where resources can be allocated. At one time or another, many companies have set up orphanages for such ideas--typically labeled "new venture divisions." But imagine a strategy process where you put senior management (the people who hold all the resources) directly alongside the folks who have typically been disenfranchised from the strategy process--young people stationed out in the field and newcomers. The challenge is to get engaged in deep and meaningful conversations about opportunity and destiny. There's no reason a new and innovative strategy idea should take two years to fight its way up through the ranks of stodgy, uncomprehending managers. The route from insight to commitment doesn't have to be as painful and fraught as it is in most companies.

New perspectives. One can't raise an individual's IQ, but it is possible to help someone see the world in new ways. If you ever took an economics course, you probably didn't enjoy it at first. But one day something clicked, and you began to see the world through a new lens. Suddenly you understood how interest rates get determined, how supply and demand work to set prices, and what things influence exchange rates. You became enlightened.

Great strategy requires new ways of seeing. Redefining what a company does best constitutes a new way of seeing. Also, looking at your products or services differently can help. For example, Oracle hopes to create an entirely new business around PCs. How? By looking at the personal computer and then figuring out how to separate form from function. As a consumer, you don't want a PC; you want an information utility (just like you want an electric utility). Oracle's goal is to deliver this information utility in a form quite different from today's PC; the company is working on software for a simple $500 device that will handle most people's information needs.

But it is not only a new lens that can provide enlightenment, so too can a new vantage point. Sometimes a company simply cannot see the future from where it is standing. For example, Nokia, a Finnish company that makes cellular phones and is based at the edge of the Arctic, may be ill-positioned to track lifestyle trends on the other side of the planet--trends that could ultimately redefine its industry. One possible solution--send Finnish engineers to Venice Beach in California, down Kings Road in London, or to other places on the planet where new lifestyle trends get set. Immerse those engineers in the new cultural milieu; change their experience base. Mining the world for ideas has helped Nokia invent new approaches. One example: Nokia engineers devised the idea of colorful--bright red, yellow, and blue--phones, which opened a whole new market for the company.

Opportunities for innovative strategy don't emerge from sterile analysis and number crunching--they emerge from novel experiences that can create opportunities for novel insights. As the songwriter Jimmy Buffet succinctly put it, "Changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes." Of course, one produces a shift perspective not only by moving people into different geographical settings but by moving them into different industry settings as well. For example, Enron, widely regarded as one of the world's most innovative energy companies, is reconceiving the energy business from the vantage point of the financial industry (see the interview that follows). Enron's financial whiz kids have built sophisticated computer-based tools that enable the company to exploit arbitrage opportunities in energy markets and help customers manage the financial risks associated with buying and selling various forms of energy. Houston meets Wall Street.

New passions. We've too often ignored the emotional side of strategy. If strategy is partly about collective purpose and a sense of shared destiny, don't we need to recognize this explicitly in the way we go about creating strategy? For example, has anyone out there looked explicitly at the issue of commitment? I don't mean the commitment of financial resources by senior executives, but the emotional commitment of individuals at the bottom of the organization who are being asked to devote their lives to carrying out a new strategy.

The question is, Can one accelerate the time it takes to get employees committed to a new strategy, and thereby reduce the time between idea and action? I believe that one way of raising commitment is to get individuals throughout the organization deeply involved in the process of creating strategy. Individuals, I would argue, should have a say in determining the destiny of the organizations to which they devote their efforts.

Of course, the concern of top management is that involving so many people will prove chaotic. But most individuals have a deep need for order. When a CEO gets more people to participate in making strategy, things may seem crazy at first, but at some point the natural tendency for order takes over, and individuals begin to work mightily to bring order out of chaos. There is an inflection point where the quest for divergence is transformed into a quest for convergence, and a new collective point of view emerges--but one that is typically much richer, more complex, and more sophisticated than the original orthodoxy about the firm's "strategy." It is possible to get thousands of people passionately involved with an idea like quality and yet still maintain coherence--why can't the same be accomplished with strategy?

I believe that inside almost every individual is a deep passion for discovery and novelty. We try new restaurants, take vacations in new places, and search out new experiences of all kinds. I always find it amazing to see the passions that are unleashed when an organization goes to its members and invites them to participate in charting their collective destiny. We must give employees an emotional stake in the future. I can assure you that it is possible to wrap meaning and purpose around even prosaic products. Listen to David Pottruck, COO of Charles Schwab: "Our employees see themselves as the custodians of our customers' financial dreams." Wow! When was the last time your local bank teller had such a thought? So to all you strategists and corporate leaders eager to create value--get a soul!

Experimentation. Passion and foresight will only get you so far. When it comes to executing a strategy, the end target may be clearly visible--"I want to climb that mountain over there"--but much of the route may be invisible from the starting point. The only way you're going to see the path ahead is to start moving. Thus strategy is as much about experimentation as it is about foresight and passion.

In many organizations, the quest for efficiency drives out experimentation. One question I often ask managers: "Can you point to 20 or 30 small experiments going on in your company that you believe could fundamentally remake your company?" In most cases, the answer is no, there is nothing to point to.

In the new economy, we are attempting to explore vast spaces of possibility--how genetics will remake medicine, how biotech will change the chemical industry, how interactive technology will change the very idea of a university, and so on. IBM asks the question, "How will the Internet remake industry structures?" Well, it doesn't matter how many gurus, consultants, and dollars IBM throws at this question; the answer is still going to be at least partly unclear. The breadth of experimentation must be related to the degree of unknowability that confronts the firm. IBM needs to experiment on a broad front.

Kent Foster, president of GTE, puts the problem of unknowability this way: "We are talking about products that are still evolving, delivered to a market that is still emerging, via a technology that is still changing on a daily basis." This must sound familiar to any executive trying to chart a course through the chaotic frenzy that is the new economy. Clearly, experimentation is a must in this environment. As Apple learned to its sorrow with the Newton (a hand-held computer that fizzled), chutzpah isn't a substitute for learning about your market.

The more experimentation, the faster a company can understand precisely which strategies are likely to work. The goal is not to develop "perfect" strategies, but to develop strategies that take us in the right direction, and then progressively refine them through rapid experimentation and adjustment.

So where does this leave us? Convinced, I hope, that the best way to create wealth for employees and stockholders is to renew our commitment to developing and executing innovative strategies. I believe we should spend less time working on strategy as a "thing" and more time working to understand the preconditions that give rise to the "thing." Science is closing in on the deep secrets of life. We must redouble our efforts to close in on the deep secrets of corporate vitality.

A best-selling author, Hamel is chairman of Strategos, an international consulting firm specializing in strategy. He is also visiting professor of strategic and international management at the London Business School.

Source:Fortune

Innovation Cannot be Forced, Innovation Happens!

Innovation means brining the new into the world. And the new cannot come from the mind. If you carefully understand the mind, it is knowledge. The mind is composed of all the information that we have accumulated till date. It consists of all the knowledge that we have gained from people, places, books, magazines, articles, research, things and objects. All these information that has been stored in our memory constitues our data base. And this data base is old. These consists of things that are already there, otherwise there would not be in our memory. We must have had this information collected somewhere, sometime in the past. When we "think", we only search through the data base of old files and perform permutations and combinations with the available data. Therefore thinking cannot lead to creation of something new. Thinking cannot be used to Innovate, because whatever we think is all old. Even our goals are a part of this knowledge. All goals are from the memory; whatever we decide to create in the future, has already been in the past, otherwise we would not be able to make it into a goal. So making a goal to innovate somthing is also futile; we are bound to reinvent the wheel in a different way. Real innovation is - going beyond the human mind.To read more Click

What skills are in demand?

The working environment whether in companies or humanitarian industries is changing very fast. Forbes has published an article which talks about the basic skills that are in demand which can fetch you job in 2013 with the title the 10 skills that will get you a job in 2013. How you think systems through and work within the context of the team. Having the mind set of applying the learning, having the mindset and logic to process the learning are some of the critical skills in demand.  Let me summarise the skill sets here

1. Critical thinking
2. Complex problem solving
3. Decision making
4. Active listening
5. Computers and electronics
6. Mathematics
7. Operations and system analysis
8. Monitoring
9. Writing computer programming
10. Sales and marketing

The first four applies to all industries. whether one needs new job or continues to work in the same job but the challenge for us is are we prepared for the new demand of skills?

Can we reduce Infant mortality?

I am at Patna attending in the World Vision India's ToT training programme on Maternal and Child health. Volunteers, staff, ASHA workers from 7 districts (Bhojpur, Patna, Vaishali, Muzaffarpur, Nalanda and Nawada are participating. Infant mortality rate: total: 46.07 deaths/1,000 live births male: 44.71 deaths/1,000 live births female: 47.59 deaths/1,000 live births (2012 est.) (Source:India Infant Mortality (2012).
 In a layman term Infant Mortality is children dying between 0-12 months of their birth. Dr P.K Goswami says that 50% of Infant mortality comes from New Born death i.e. children dying between 0 -28 days of their birth and 50% of the new born death is contributed by children dying between 0 - 7 days. So logically we can conclude that if Infant mortality in India to be reduced the New Born death (0-28 days) has to be stopped. Otherwise it is very difficult for India to bring down IMR.
So what are the various causes of new born deaths? Dr Goswami said that following some are the medical causes 1. Hypothermia (Temperature of child's body is less than the normal), 2. Birth Hypoxia 3. Birth Trauma, 4. Sepsis 4. Pneumonia.
Then how could New Born death be reduced. Dr Goswami cited the following few preventive measures:

1. Wrapping of new born baby with clean clothes. cover head, hands and feet
2. Breast feeding
3. Eye care of the new born
4. Care of umbilical cord
5. Cleanliness

Dr Goswami says that if these few simple actionable actions are done 50% of new born deaths can be prevented.

I sent an SMS to Dr Jayakumar Christian, CEO of World Vision India. He said, "Strange that with solution that simple we still let millions die in our country."
What we need then? We need to relook our public health strategy. Simply shouting at government will not prevent new born deaths. Create mass awareness among the mothers, Panchayats, health workers, TBAs. NGOs promote this vigorously. It does not cost much but need Personal Passion. One need not wait for government to come to rescue the new born babies. This could be done by any one who really wants to save lives of new born.

Again, this is the responsibility of every individual to help save lives. If India has to reduce IMR then issues of New born death has to be addressed at any cost.

Strategy implementation: An alternative to inspiring through fear

Source: Knowledge Network: Faculty & Research

Leaders get paid to think big, which means they sometimes announce ambitious initiatives and then leave the details for others to figure out. These leaders hand down the marching orders and expect targets to be hit. But they are not around at 3 a.m. to see the fallout on the rank and file.

They do not see the impact on people like the project manager we recently met in a Fortune 100 company. She routinely returns home from work around 7 p.m., cooks dinner for her family and puts her daughter to bed. Then she opens her laptop and works several more hours, often until 3 a.m.

We asked her why she does this. Her response serves as a wakeup call for leaders everywhere who distance themselves from strategy implementation. “They keep adding new initiatives,” she told us. “These leaders don’t fully understand what it takes to translate their vision into results.” This project manager is a high-performer who refuses to fail. But she has human limits.

Click to read further..........

Effective leaders are effective storytellers by Daniel Goleman

Good storytelling is a hallmark of effective leadership. It’s a medium that allows leaders to move others. It also lets others know who the leader is. How the leader thinks and feels. I recently spoke with my colleague Howard Gardner for my Leadership: A Master Class series. Howard talks about three kinds of story telling approaches. One is the ordinary story. These are the stories that everybody tells, in this sector, in this domain, in this company, in this school. Then there are the leaders who bring a new twist to these same old stories. There’s also the visionary leader who creates an entirely new story, which makes me think of the role of story telling in innovation and creativity.

Below is a recap of Howard’s thoughts on how and when leaders might use storytelling techniques to motivate and inspire.

I would want to make a distinction between the role of stories in the actual creative process and then the role of stories as it were, spreading the creation to others. I'm absolutely certain that a very important part of any new invention, whether it’s mechanical or literary or artistic, is a narrative vehicle which helps people relate to that. It helps them understand the ways in which it is complementary to, or consistent with or directly in clash with, what you did before.

I think the most iconoclastic painting in the twentieth century is Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. It was so shocking at the time that he kept it under wraps for a decade because almost nobody could handle it. I think the narrative around the introduction of something new is imperative. When it comes to the actual creative process itself, I think that would vary enormously.

If you were working in a science lab and you pick up something that's askew and you decide rather than ignoring it or throwing it away, you really dig into it, I think you could talk about a narrative in a kind of metaphoric way. Namely how we used to phrase this one way and now we frame it another. It’s an interesting idea to see how far you can push this story angle not just in terms of public presentation and convincing, but actually in terms of creating the new ideas themselves.

In terms of startups, let’s look at Mark Zuckerberg. He probably got the Facebook idea working in his dorm room. We all will think it happened the way it happened in the movie, Social Network, and he didn't need anybody else for that. Once he began to become an enterprise, then clearly he needed to be able to attract people. He also needed to have direct and indirect leadership qualities to effectively tell his story.

Direct leadership means you know this is the person who is trying to convince you of something, and you look at what he says, how he says it and how they behave. Direct leadership can't survive the hypocrisy test, because if you push something very strongly in your narrative but every day you're undoing it in your behavior, then you have Newt Gingrich, who is not very convincing any more because what he calls for is so violated by his own life.

Indirect leadership is simply creating some kind of a symbolic product. It could be a literary work or it could be a mathematical equation. It could even be a computer program which itself is so heretical against the earlier standard that people consciously or unconsciously say “God!” We better pay attention to this. There are some inventions that you don't need to mobilize anybody else. I mean if you prove Fermat's Last Theorem and you publish it, the work is done, but if you're trying to start a corporation, you need the venture capitalists and you need people who you can count on to give you honest feedback.

Entrepreneurs need to be very effective story tellers, because basically it’s a promise of a possibility that they're selling to people, and they're mobilizing people around them. If anything, I think this has probably become too important. Namely, if you're a great story teller, you have more success than warranted, and if you're a lousy story teller you may never get to first base. What I would then say, and I don't know a venture capitalist personally, to what extent are they smart enough to basically filter out the charisma and look at the idea per se?

Source: Linkedin

Strategy is the story | Strategy is the story - London Business School BSR

Strategy is the story | Strategy is the story - London Business School BSR

Stevie Spring, who recently stepped down after a successful stint as CEO of Future plc, the specialty magazine publisher, once told me, “I am not really the company’s CEO; what I really am is its Chief Story Teller.”

What she meant is that she believed that telling a story was her most important task as a CEO. Actually, she insisted, her job was to tell the same story over and over again. And when she said ‘a story’, she meant that her job was to tell her representation of the company’s strategy: the direction she wanted to take the business and how that was going to make it prosper and survive. She felt that a good CEO should tell that kind of story repeatedly, to all employees, shareholders, fund managers and analysts. For, indeed, a good strategy does tell a story.

Not fiction

All successful CEOs whom I have seen were great storytellers. Not necessarily because of their oratorical skills, but because the characteristics of the strategy they had put together lent themselves to being told like a story — and a good one too! The most important thing for a CEO to do is to provide a coherent, compelling strategic direction for the company, one that is understood by everyone who has to contribute to its achievement. For that, a story must be told.

When I say this, I am not implying that CEOs need to engage in fiction, nor do they need to be overly dramatic. In my view, a good business strategy story has three characteristics.

First, the story must provide clear choices. Stevie Spring’s choices were as clear as her forthright language: “We provide specialty magazines, for young males, in British.” Hence, it was clear what was out; there were to be no magazines on, say, ‘music’ (that is too broad), no magazines in German (although that could be a perfectly profitable business for someone else) and no magazines on pottery or vegetable gardens (unless that has recently seen a surge in popularity among young males in the UK without my knowing it). A good strategy story has to contain such a set of genuine choices.

Moreover, it has to be clear how the choices made by the company’s leaders hang together. For example, Frank Martin, who as a CEO orchestrated the revival of the British model-train maker, Hornby, by turning it from a toy company into a hobby company, put his strategy story in just 15 words. “We make perfect scale models for adult collectors, which appeal to some sense of nostalgia.” He decided to focus on making perfect scale models because that is what collectors look for. Moreover, people would usually specifically collect the Hornby brand because it reminded them of their childhood, and with it a nostalgic, foregone era. Frank Martin’s choices were not just a bunch of disconnected strategic decisions; they hung together, and, combined, made for a logical story.

Second, the story must tie to the company’s resources. Importantly, the set of choices has to be clearly linked to the company’s unique resources, those that can give them a competitive advantage in an attractive segment of the market. Although Hornby had been hovering on the brink of bankruptcy for a decade, it still had some valuable resources. First of all, it possessed a valuable brand that was very well-known and appreciated by people who had owned a Hornby train as children.

Additionally, the company had a great design capability in its hometown of Margate. However, these resources weren’t worth much when competing with the cheaper Chinese toy makers. The children who wanted a toy train for their birthday didn’t know (and could care less) about the Hornby brand. The precision modelling skills of the engineers in Margate weren’t of much value in the toy segment, where things mostly had to be robust and durable. However, these two resources — an iconic brand and a design capability — were of considerable value when making ‘perfect scale models for adult collectors’. It was a perfect match of existing resources to strategy.

I observed a similar thing at the Sadler’s Wells theatre. Ten years ago, before the current CEO Alistair Spalding took over, the theatre put on all sorts of grand shows in various performing arts. Yet, the company was in dire straits, losing money evening-on-evening and by the bucket. Then, Spalding took over and highlighted his leadership with a clear story. He started telling everyone that the theatre was destined ‘to be the centre of innovation in dance’.

He did this because the company was blessed with two valuable resources: (1) an historic reputation for dance (although it had diversified outside dance in the preceding years) and (2) a theatre once designed specifically with dance in mind. Spalding understood that, with these unique resources, he needed to focus the theatre on dance again. Beyond that, he made it the spider in the web, a place where various innovative people and dance forms came together to create new art, a place where stars were formed.

Third, the story must create a competitive advantage. The story must not only provide choices that are linked to resources, it must also explain how these choices and resources are going to give the company a competitive advantage in an attractive market, one that others can’t easily emulate. For example, Hornby’s resources enabled it to make perfect scale models for adult collectors better than anyone else, but those adult collectors also happened to form a very affluent and growing segment, one in which margins were much better than in the super-competitive toy market. It isn’t much good to have a competitive advantage in a dying market; you want to be able to do something better than anyone else in a market that will make you grow and prosper.

Thus, it has to be clear from your strategy story why the market is attractive and how the resources are going to enable you to capture the value in that market better than anyone else. The story of the CEO of Fremantle Media, Tony Cohen, for example, was that his company was going to make television productions that were replicable in other countries, with spillovers into other media. Because of their worldwide presence, Fremantle Media were better than their national competitors at rolling out productions such as the X-factor, Pop Idols, game shows and sitcoms. While their local competitors could also develop attractive and innovative shows, Fremantle’s multinational’s presence enabled it to reap more value from them. Therefore, that’s what they focused upon: shows that they could replicate across the globe. It was their competitive advantage, and they built their story around it.

Only a beginning

Of course, a good story alone is not enough. A leader still needs good products, people, marketing, finance and so on. But, without a good story, a leader will find it impossible to combine people and resources into a forceful strategic thrust. A good story is a necessary — although, alone, not sufficient — condition for success.

My message for leaders: if you get your story right, it can be a very powerful management tool indeed. It works to convince analysts, shareholders and the public that where you are taking the company is worth everyone’s time, energy and investment.

Perhaps even more importantly, it can provide inspiration to the people who will have to work with and implement the strategy. If employees understand the logic behind a company’s strategic choices and see how it might give the company a sustainable advantage over its competitors, they will soon believe in it. They will soon embrace it. And they will soon execute it. Collective belief is a strong precursor of success. Thus, a good story can spur a company forward and eventually make the story come true.