Three Meals are Better than One

This thought is all about how healthy you eat and why we have three meals a day rather than only one. Surprised? I am not a nutritionist and that’s not the kind of topics I write about! Well, the thought is about all our health, but not necessarily through our Diet Plan. Then what?

More often than not, we are advised to eat at regular intervals than one large meal. This activity helps the body constantly burn calories and keep all the organs active throughout the day. It avoids overcrowding of food in the stomach and helps you keep fit and healthy! Just the same way, do you think even our professional goals should be to about consistency in delivery rather than work on “one” big bang? Does this consistency in delivery help us keep active and “one” big bang result in Overcrowding?

Ranveer was known as the God of ideas. Every time the management would get into a problem, he would pop up a new idea and then things would look good. People still remember how the team got saved once  when team was under tremendous sales pressure and Ranveer came up with some ideas to boost institutional sales, which helped achieve targets for the quarter. At the end of the year, Ranveer was confident of getting one of the highest ratings in the company. During his appraisal discussion, he had a lot of new ideas to take credit for– improvement in institutional sales, review calendar formalization, proper allocation of media spends for festive and a lot many more. But his Boss, Amar, certainly didn’t seem to be very happy. Ranveer got upset and asked how can he not get happy with his performance. And then Amar asked a few questions:

è When was the last time company generated some institutional orders? – Did we forget about it when sales pressure got a little relieved?

è When did the last review happen as per your review calendar? – Was it simple and practical enough to be followed regularly?

è What happened to the Allocation of Media Spends for last quarter? -  Did we use the learnings of Festive to make last quarter allocation better?

And suddenly Ranveer knew what Amar was saying. All these things were great initiatives, but happened only once!

The world is full of bright and brilliant ideas, and all of us tend to have some of them. But then, why are only few people successful. That’s because success is not a result of one Big Initiative, but of delivering consistently. Take a look around and see what are the things you really admire – your favorite restaurant serving your favorite soup with just the right amount of salt in it, your favorite apparel store which always stocks “your” size of garments or even your spouse, on whom you know you can depend in the worst of times – consistency wins hands down! Trying a new restaurant or a new shop never gives you the happiness and satisfaction that the power of consistency does.  It helps us not worry about the regular things in life and focus on more innovative and new ways of working / living.

A lot of us have beautiful ideas and take amazing initiatives. The fact remains, that if we do not take the efforts to convert those ideas into processes, and achieve regularity in it, we will never be able to harness the complete benefit of the idea at all.

A lot of times, I have seen that people get into complex models and calculations to arrive at a conclusion and I can instantly tell them that this way of working is not going to work at all – simply because it is not “simple”. The more we try to complicate things around, more the chances of it not being repeated. So the basic law of achieving consistency in work, is to keep things simple. Maybe it’ll not get us to the best level of precision, but if we are able to repeat the activity at a regular frequency, it will give us much better results than the last decimal place of a number.

Another thing which is useful in helping you achieve consistency is measuring of results. If you don’t get convinced about the results of the effort, no matter how great the idea is, you will always feel like postponing the next occurrence of the activity. Measuring of results also helps in determining whether an idea is really workable or not. A lot of ideas do seem very bright on the paper, but in reality, they may not turn out to be as great. Therefore, it becomes really important for us to measure the outcome of an initiative and act upon it accordingly. An idea without action is as good as no idea.

In business, we constantly strive to achieve consistency in everything – be it sales, profits and performance. It is from each individual, that consistency will come. A lot of times, terms like “disproportionate growths” are confused as “one time” and therefore, constant efforts go missing. We need to completely believe that one time efforts may lead to short term success but to be the ultimate success story – the only thing which will work for us is consistency!

Hoping to hear your feedback on the topic!

 PS: You can also reach me out at @agrawalsanjeev on twitter.

How do you go Where You want to Go?

This is a post about the importance of planning and not just engaging in fire fighting. Often most of us are good at fire fighting. Is that enough? Read on......

Pritesh is a fresh MBA and is all set to take the new role of Sales In Charge of a Brand in an FMCG company. On his first day, his Boss told him that they were looking at a 20% growth from this brand in the current fiscal year, which was 50% higher than the growth delivered by the brand in last year. Confident that Pritesh was of himself, he happily accepted the targets and also told his Boss that he will be closing the year at more than the expected levels. Pritesh started enthusiastically  and was focused on solving the problems. As soon as any problem cropped up, he immediately referred to his academic books and came up with a relevant solution. He was efficiently tackling all the problems that were coming up, but somehow, something was not right. He was still not achieving his targets. In the half yearly review with his boss, it was reflected that Pritesh’s brand was growing at the same pace as last year and the targets were being missed. When confronted, Pritesh, as he genuinely believed, told him that the targets given to him were too high to be achieved. And then his Boss asked him, “Ok, what are you plans for achieving the targets in the next six months?”. Pritesh was blank.

A lot of times this is what happens to us. We want to deliver results but we forget the first step that is required for success of any project or delivering any result – Plan. One statement that I have come to believe in, is – “If you can’t put a plan on a piece of paper, there are no chances of being able to achieve the end result”. Isn’t this true for everything that we do in our lives? Now, think of this:

Now for the next six months, Pritesh took 3 days, only to strategize what would he do to get to the sales. He listed down all the possible ways to increase the sales, referred to his academic books and chalked out a month by month plan of the milestones he would want to achieve. Along with top line increase, he also jotted down what were other problem areas like Team Motivation and Margin Management and drafted out a complete plan for next year. Now, every month, he keeps a track of whether he has achieved his target or not.  He knows if the plan worked or not, and in case it doesn’t work he has a Plan B ready to be implemented.  A little deviation from his plan cautions him to take corrective actions. And you can fully well understand what the end result was with this approach.

Anyone who has ever undertaken a complex task, has learned the importance of careful planning. This is relevant to every step in life which you need to “Win”. A “Game Plan” in any sports or “Preparations” for a party at home are all examples of how we need to “Plan” to ensure success. “Good planning conserves resources, prevents wasted effort, and saves time and money. Good planning prevents small problems from becoming big problems.” What happens when you start building a house and in the middle of it, you realize that you have run short of money to complete it? Planning, not only helps in determining the feasibility of delivery of targets, but also for knowing in advance whether any additional resource will be required in achieving what has been targeted. Planning also helps in giving teams (both internal and external) and the support functions about the next steps.  

If your objective is bigger, you will plan accordingly. The bigger you plan, the farther you will go. We saw how easy it was for Pritesh to blame it on the high targets. He was not prepared for the big targets and the fact that achieving them was never going to be easy. If you don’t plan Big in life, there are lesser chances of you making it Big in life, isn’t it? 

At the same time, it is important enough to know that some of your plans can fail too. In such circumstances, we can’t let things happen to us. Instead, it is equally important for us to have a Plan B ready, as an acknowledgement of the fact that plans can fail, but we are ready enough to face it!

The first step is to Decide where to go – near which is easy or far with challenges. If you have decided where you want to go, now is the time to decide How do you go? And then, you do need to know the alternate route too, just in case the first one has roadblocks.  Have a Happy Journey!

PS: You can also reach me out at @agrawalsanjeev on twitter.