An understanding to developing organizational culture to support sales and every corporate business area.

1. Managing Work Force Productivity
Replacing your work force
with competent human
resource will be a short lived
solution if the organization’s
own innovative capabilities
are seized to respond to the
changing business
environment
“ If you want
something new, you
have to stop doing
something old ”
Peter F Drucker
K. M. Saleem – Director Sales
Forces of Business Demon
Believe it or not, it’s a fight between good and evil even in the business
world. You can’t see a business demon. I have been in situations when
people are competent but organizations are not capable. Companies are
experienced but the decision making is too slow. Rules & policies are
well stated but don’t seem to intimidate people staying away from
disobedience. Hierarchical structures & departmentalization is there but
boundaries are blurred. Job commitment is high but job involvement is
low. Sounds strange, isn’t it? Astonishingly, it is very difficult to pin point
the people responsible in such cases. Even then we attempt to hold few
accountable and replace them too, but the change turns out to be very
temporary. The demon knows it very well that companies will replace
people and can acquire good machines and support ware that is why it
will not possess much of the people or except for very few top guys. Its
main target is the “organization’s innovative capabilities” which means
that organization’s own capabilities to invent a change in response to
internal & external events have been seized. It’s not about managerial
decision only; the organization itself becomes incapable of identifying
the change and a system generated response will never get activated.
Nature’s Perspective of Organizational Failure
A very famous saying; “Change before it becomes inevitable”. It seems
pretty logical because it indicates life. All the living organism change the
way they look, their abilities and try to become as compatible to the
environment as possible during their course of life cycle. Nature is the
best teacher. Viruses don’t change. Their origin goes back to millions of
years ago but they are still the same small organism because they don’t
accept change and whenever there is change in environment they
simply become inactive or die instead of fighting back. Scientists don’t
regard them even as life they are called the “edge of life”.
Dinosaurs became big and powerful as long as their ancestors were
responding to the change with a change. But there is an inherent
problem with growing very big; your brain is likely to remain smaller to
manage your big body and muscles – the very reason for the extinction
of dinosaurs. At last, the brain was not able to respond to the damage
of the body parts or could not proactively plan to save from the
potential damage and they started dying away.
Sometimes, you want to drive fast to get to the destination. You are a
licensed driver and you run the car at a very high speed because you
don’t want to compromise on time but you are actually compromising
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2. Managing Work Force Productivity
“I know several
thousand things that
won’t work“
Thomas Edison
“The best way to
predict the future
is to invent it“
K. M. Saleem – Director Sales
on one thing that is your vision – your ability to see things around. As
you increase the speed, your vision gets narrower and you will not be
able to look around except for focusing all your sight & energy on the
highway. You will miss all the good opportunities on the way to your
destination. On the other hand, a broader vision will slow down your
speed. The intelligence is neither the high speed nor a wider vision at
low speed; it’s hidden in following the principles which allow you to
enjoy both the speed & the vision.
It’s easy to work out that demonic forces will always astray you from
natural course of action. We have seen companies surviving small and
inactive as virus life since many years. Similarly, big dinosaur like names
died away because of their inability to expand their intelligence and
empower more people within their organization for strategic thinking.
There are companies who have got to the destination as market leaders
but left behind lot of expansion and branching out opportunities and
now struggling back to acquire them to enjoy a larger portfolio of
products and customers. Lastly, the companies wanting to broaden the
horizons got themselves so much over burdened with huge
diversification that they lost the brand image they were originally meant
for and now exerting energies to reposition in the market.
 Invention & Innovation Relationship
Invention is often perceived as meanings of innovation or a result of
innovation. This misperception was built-up on the very fact of few
successful inventions that gave organizations a clear advantage in their
product portfolios or production’s cost & management. These
inventions which were initially perceived as competitive advantage later
turned out to be a short lived benefit as these were copied or were
even over-developed by the industry.
Invention is all about the creativity of human minds, primarily targeted
for incremental value addition. Whereas, innovation is an
institutionalized mechanism of an organization to invent a change for
remedial, radical and incremental value creation anytime and time after
time. Invention can be purchased but you cannot buy innovation. Here
comes in the concept of “inventive organizations” often misunderstood
as “innovative organizations”. There is a very fine line between being
“innovative” and “inventive” and rarely organizations can find
themselves turning inventive from innovative. Inventive organizations
will always try to contain their inventiveness to their R&D department
or restrict to very few top level people but innovative organizations will
cascade down the innovative behaviors to every employee. They define
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3. Managing Work Force Productivity
the processes & values that innovation matters at all levels of the
company.
 Knowledge & Skill Relationship
People are always best defined by their abilities and human ability is
neither the possession of bulk of information not it’s the capacity to
perform big loads of work. It’s a result of direct relationship between
knowledge & skill. Not every information is a knowledge, it is the only
information that is retained by our system (which can be a human brain
also) and is retrievable at the time of need. As human beings, we come
across to lot of information every day through our senses and
experience but we need to ensure a deliberate conversion of
information into knowledge so that it can be reclaimed whenever
desirable. That’s what we try to evaluate at the time of interview that
how much a prospective candidate is able to recall the job related
information and present it as associated knowledge. The skills can only
be acquired when knowledge is practiced and without the requisite
knowledge is just not possible to develop skills in any area. The hiring
process should ensure a minimum knowledge and skill set of its people
and then developing them further is the organization’s responsibility.
This is where most of organizations fail to cope with the market demand
of human resource competence. They fall short of processes and values
that foster the development of human abilities of their people.
Knowledge power and skills of our teams and individuals define the
human ability to perform a task.
 Attitude & Situation Relationship
Whenever we talk about team’s productivity and especially sales teams,
the subject of motivation comes up as a foremost important driving
force. Undoubtedly, a motivated sales team can do wonders but we
need to understand what exactly we mean by that. Motivation is all
about “sense of achievement”. Higher the sense of achievement, higher
will be the motivation level of the team. It’s a very delicate form of
human emotion and cultivates only in positive situations that is a
“culture of appreciation”. A positive attitude whenever gets a positive
situation or in other words, “whenever a winning attitude is
appreciated, it will result in immense motivation. I understand that
without a victory in hand it’s very difficult to appreciate something
which does not exist but leaders have to find the ways out and
opportunities for that. Rather we should institutionalize a process of
formal appreciation but believe me an informal gratitude fosters greater
sense of achievement than anything else. I still remember, one day my
K. M. Saleem – Director Sales
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4. Managing Work Force Productivity
“The opposite of
motivation is the
absence of sense
of achievement”
K. M. Saleem – Director Sales
boss calling me and said; “Saleem! Your have been marvelous
yesterday, you did highest sales of the day in the country”. It might have
gone unnoticed if my boss had not known the concept of appreciation
of a victory which is still not in hand yet. It gave me a very high sense of
achievement, probably higher than any recognized quarterly awards I
ever got. That was a buck up for the next quarterly target catch. It’s a
formula that a positive attitude when added with positive situation, will
result in positive motivation and if anything out of the attitude &
situation is negative, the motivation will go negative.
An important confusion must be cleared between motivation &
satisfaction. Many a times, we try to address the satisfaction levels of
our teams and expect motivation to come out of it. Satisfaction is
related to monetary incentives, rewards, compensation or job
descriptions which may work as a tool of motivation for a short while
but after some time, it is perceived as a norm and a right to claim. We
need to understand that a satisfied employee may still need to be
motivated. From this point onwards, the opposite of motivation is not
demotivation, it’s the absence of sense of achievement. Ensuring a
higher job satisfaction level among your teams can be a step forward to
motivating them but actual motivation will only turn on when we
provide a positive work environment to satisfied employees which will
create a will to excel in their performances.
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