Chill @ Work

- On Focus: Person who chases two rabbits catches neither (Confucius)
- Einstein defined insanity as doing the same things but expecting different results.
- The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions.
- Great men get noticed when they fail, ordinary men when they succeed.
- A common fallacy amongst leaders is to construe the absence of evidence as the evidence of absence. (Jetwings)
- If you think you are too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room (Anita Roddick - founder of Body Shop)
- True innovators live out of their imaginations - not their memories.
- Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up to the step; we must step up the stairs. (Vaclav Havel)
- Work is thought of as something that you have to do, while play is something that you choose to do. This distinction is more of an idea than reality, since both require physical and mental energy. The best coaches in the world are those who absolutely love what they are doing. (Ken Blanchard in "The little book of coaching")
- Client focused vs. Out to Lunch: Business is about loving the people who do business with you and giving them more value than they have any right to expect.
- It DOES matter where you sit in the office. Especially when you are lowly in the hierarchy, during the first few weeks, sit in a place that is highly visible. Such a place is usually a passage which has a heavy flow of human traffic. On the other hand, when are you are a top-shot, (I guess) you should be seen as exclusive and therefore be in a ‘exclusive’ cabin. (Self, 2001)
- When your confidence is badly shaken, ACT cool. This means that you should reduce your “rate” (or speed) of work – walk slowly, talk slowly, turn slowly and let your actions be quite slow. (Self, 2001)
- Customers can only be as happy as your employees. This underlines the important of the frontline delivery persons. If these people are underpaid or overworked, your customers will notice it! (Self, 2001)
- Either revise your products and services as the customers tells you, or tell them why you can’t. (Self, 2001)
- Involve top 30 customers in designing of products. (Self, 2001)
- Give customers a “total ownership” experience. While this is possible in high involvement items like cars, the question is – can you do it for groceries? (Self, 2001, while brainstorming BombayPulse)
- Rather than reward employees solely on the number of deliveries, why not reward those employees who generate greater profits and customer satisfaction? Pursue customers aggressively for feedback, even if it is negative and especially if it is negative. Establish bilateral communication between management and frontline employees. This communication should be truly bilateral. Frontline employees should have the sense that management will listen seriously to any observation and suggestions they make. Train employees to improve customers’ expectation of product and services. Customer oriented companies establish point-of-contact employees whom customers know by name (if not by face) and whom they can call with any question or complain, confident that their query will be taken seriously. (From a book read in 2001)
- Corporate Mantra: SERVE – Service, Excellence, Respect, Value and Enthusiasm. ECHO – Each Contact Has Opportunity. (Unknown Source)
- You know that an organization is stagnating when there is a lot of intent and little concrete action. In an organization that is young at soul, there is no distinction between intent and action. (Vipul Chawla, at HLL, now – Unilever Limited)
- Age before wisdom. (A comment by Arijit Biswas from TCS, while reflecting on the promotion policies in most Indian organizations)
- Logic does not change emotions, but if perception changes, then emotions change. (New Thinking for the New Millennium by Edward De Bono)
- We must believe in luck. Else how can we explain the success of those whom we don’t like? (Jean Cocteau)
- No one is BUSY in this world. It's all about priorities. (Source - unknown)