Tough Times

Tough times are the heartbreaking times of all. The time seems to run slowly than usual and everyday becomes the longest day of life. You feel like seeing far into the future but nothing is visible.

Depression and frustration sets in. The smile and glow that always used to be on your face vanishes, and people around you start to feel the difference in your behaviour. You constantly think of the worst and the more you think, your thoughts become worse. The road ahead of you looks dark, gloomy and deserted.

Tough Times comes into everyones life at one point of time, so it isn't in our best interests to depress ourselves and let that depression affect others around us. Even the mighty Pandavas had to endure tough times. Not even Lord Krishna was able to save them from these horrible times, although he was with them from the beginning till the end. If you observe closely you will find that Arjuna did not sit idle and kept worrying about the future, instead he learnt new skills and acquired divyastras from Indra, Shiva & others would help him in the oncoming war. What we can learn from this is praying god will not make your bad time go away, god will surely be with you during those times and help you come out of it, most importantly one should not sit idle and waste time by worrying about the present but work to acquire new skills like arjuna did that would help him in the future.

Everyone feels alone & deserted during bad times. But krishna says,  "Everyone is alone in this world, fighting his own private battle"

So all you people having tough times remember: "Tough times vanishes, Tough men don't".

Commitment v/s Compromise

Commitment is hard.

Compromise is easy.

Commitment means sticking to your guns no matter what.

Compromise means flowing with the wind which ever way it blows.

Commitment  is  doing  what  is  right  no  matter what people say.

Compromise is doing what people say as long as it isn’t too awfully bad.

Commitment is deciding, “I will never do wrong.”

Compromise is waffling, “Well, just this once.”

Commitment is saying “Yes.”

Compromise is saying, “Yes, but ...” 

Commitment is hard.

Compromise is easy.

Develop an Attitude for Success

I found this great article written by 

MARY JO MANZANARES on November 10th, 2006 

So thought of adding it to my blog

How we deal with misfortune can make the difference between defeat and victory in our lives.

We’ve all heard stories about Thomas Edison.  He went through thousands of unsuccessful attempts before coming up with the filament light bulb.  When his factory was virtually destroyed by fire, he simply remarked that the disaster provided him with new opportunities to start again, and weeks later he invented the phonograph.

How many of us, when faced with misfortune, have that same outlook as Edison?  We view these misfortunes as failures.  We must learn, however, that these failures, properly handled, lead to great personal growth and professional success.

Here are some are six attitudes that you can adopt that will help you claim victory in your life:

Never Give Up.  If Edison’s experiences don’t convince us to never give up, I’m not sure what will.  There are countless other examples where a failure turned into an opportunity to, as Henry Ford said, “begin again more intelligently.”

Live in the Present.  Keeping a focus on the present and future, rather than dwelling in the past, helps us avoid the quagmire of regrets.  We must never lose our vision for other possibilities in our life.

Accept the Challenge.  Don’t wallow in defeat, instead we must renew our efforts to succeed and do even greater things.  In difficult times, we frequently learn just how much drive we have inside of us, challenging us to set our goals higher still.

Banish the Word Failure.  The word is full of emotional baggage and negative connotations.  We must choose to think of it as a temporary setback, a time for adjustment, or some other emotionally neutral word.  We must not give away our personal power to a word.

Continue to Learn.  It’s the only way we grow.  If we don’t learn from the past we are destined to repeat it.

We Can Succeed.  Failure isn’t fatal.  We can learn from and overcome our setbacks, growing wiser and stronger along the way.  It’s been said often enough, but it’s still true, we can turn tragedy into triumph.

http://www.leadershipturn.com/develop-an-attitude-for-success/

Manager - How Not To Be

As soon we hear that word "Manager", the first thing that comes to our mind is a person who gives orders, ask others to work, dictate others etc and may be thats the reason many of us want to become managers, cos all of us want to dictate, none of us like to take orders. However, is that what a manager really is? A person who gives orders and asks others to work. Well for many of us the answer is "yes". Anyways none of us wants to be spoken ill about nor would like to hear anyone speaking bad about us. All of us as managers want to be praised and looked upon as an ideal. There are lots of books available in the market that teaches about how to become an effective manager, how to be a productive and a lovable manager and many more. But according to me its far more important to learn and get trained on how not to be manager than how to be.

5 Qualities a manager should not posses:

1. Show Attitude
Many manager's suffer from this feeling of bossism and that they are here to command the employees.The feeling of insecurity inside them make them more bossy. They somehow feel that if they donot show attitude or boss over his/her subordinates the subordinates are not going to listen to them. But they miss the fact that showing attitude does a reverse affect on them, which they fail to notice. Althought the employees do the work assigned to them by their manager, whether he/her shows attitude or not, the manager loses the Good will. The subordinates start disliking him/her.

2. Never look upon on your subordinates
This is second most important thing that one manager should always keep in mind when speaking to his/her reportees. He/she may not have done well the last time but that doesn't make the employee a bad one. After all he has been selected and assigned the process by the recruiters only after thoroughly interviewing him/her. It is normal for humans to do mistakes, but its the responsibility of a good manager to sit together with the employee and retrospect and try to see what went wrong and why did this happen. If necessary the mistake must be shared among others during team meetings without revealing the name of the person who committed it,such that it never happens again. But please "Donot look down on them just because they made a silly mistake and make them feel that they are good for nothing".

3. Donot pass any sarcastic comments over your subordinates and Donot group up with other managers and leaders and ridicule your assosciates ( this is seen more among the young managers)
Another major thing seen primarily among young managers are that they take their assosciates for granted and just to show them off before their assosciates they tend to make comments over their subordinates during team meetings and team hurdles. This does no good for the manager, infact it does more bad and no good at all. If they feel that he will be taken to be as a jovial and friendly manager then they are wrong. Although it may feel to the managers at that moment because the employees also join the laugh with him/her. But dont you get fooled, they laugh not because, they liked it, its because they are left with no other options. You are just increasing the hatered for you among them and believe me they are never gonna forget the comments that you made on them although it is quite obvious that you are not gonna remember them. And when they hit back its gonna be real hard.

4. Don't tell your subordinates that he doesn't expect anything great from them
A good manager must always be optimisitc and he must install that optimism in his subordinates. It might be that your previous team haven't performed well or might be that you may not have had the right people for the right job. But one should not look with the same eye everytime. Donot tell you new joinees or your new team that you have never had a great team or your previous team never functioned well and hence I dont expect much from you guys either. If the previous team has not functioned properly or according to the function required its the managers fault and not the employees. Its what the manager is paid for, to make the team function properly and effectively. If you cannot do that then the problem is with you and its you who needs to change.

5. Donot expect new joinees to become perfect in a single day
All the managers are in a hurry to get the new joinees trained fast and make them productive and their hurry is justified as they have commitments to keep, but donot take it too far. Donot expect them to be perfect with the process and tools in a single day of training. Train the employees, and give them time to come up the learning curve. Think of the time that you had taken to learn the process. Make a note of mistakes that new joinees commonly make and teach them that so that they donot do it. Be innovative in training.

Importantly
Donot laugh at your subordinates when they do something wrong, its not gonna help you in anyway, instead smile at them, clap them, pat them when they do something right. And this is surely gonna help you.

Hope this helps new budding managers.

To learn how to become a great manager read the book "The One Minute Manager". Its really a nice one and will definitely help the new budding as well as old managers.

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and achieve more, then you are a LEADER.

What BPO industry has brought to India ?

Suddenly there was a huge requirement for english speaking graduates in the country. Massive recruitments started, only qualifiction that needed was to be able to communicate in english effectively , no other knowledge was neccessary. Huge packages were given to lure the crowd and many even got opportunities to fly abroad for training. If you could talk in english without your MTI (Mother tongue Influence) that was enough to land into a BPO sector. Many new big and small training centers started that taught Indians how to speak english in an accent, what they called a 'Neutral Accent'. This came as a huge opportunity to thousands of young, talented unemployed graduates. Their dreams for working for multi-national companies was standing before them. This was huge turning point for India which changed some parts and some section of people in India completely.

Indians started working for multi-national companies, got adjusted to their timings (night shifts). India started becoming popular around the world as one of the largest service oriented nation.
Huge money started flowing into the country. Stock markets boomed, young Indians who could never have dreamt about the amount of money started taking home that amount as their salaries. Huge malls, showrooms started blooming to fuel the needs for these young indians. Automobile industry started growing. A family that had just a scooter now had two motor-bikes and a car. Many started feeling that India has started to shine.

There was a rush to get into these industry, mainly because it offered good salary, home pick up and drop which was something unheard of before, status in the society, and working in an magnificient environment. These multi national companies had built up a huge palacious office environments which looked like resorts and every Indian aspired working for one. Before a student was out of the college their packages and job was being fixed at the campuses. So the student had no worry of job and need not had to hunt for a job after he completed his studies. It was like heaven. The company used to train you and then put them in some process depending on their requirements.

However all was not good. The smoking and drinking went up. They had lots of money in their hand which they didn't know whether they were eligible to have. Loyalty and sincerity had become words of distant past. People started jumping job cause the other companies offered them higher packages. The situation became like there was huge employment but the problem was unemployability. Land rates boomed up. Only people working in those organisation could only afford buying houses. Yet there was a large amount of population that was not an english speaking crowd. These industry did do one more good, it provided secondary employment too, like employements for the cab drivers, the bandi walas etc.

But what this did bpo industry actually do to India ? Did it really made India grow ? Did it provide employment ? Did it or Will it do good to the country ?
The answer surely would be "Yes" on the first go. However, if I say "No", its not so. Why is it not like that, would be your instant question. After all it did give us employment when we had nothing to do. It gave good money so that we can build and secure our future. It gave us everything that we couldn't possibly haven't imagined about working for a small indian company.

All the above points are valid and justified, but if we think deeply on it we see that although it looks like winning in the beginning we are losing on the long run.
Reasons:
Huge amount of educated and talented youth are working for a service based industry which has got nothing to do with India. We are spending all our knowledge and talent for someone else.
We are not producing anything. We are just providing service, something like, what a mechanic does.
Reasearch and Development is done by others, all we do is troubleshooting silly problems.
Customer care and Technical support jobs are jobs that needs to be done by a undergraduate person. But when I see Post graduates and Engineers woking in that sector its heartbreaking. Mainly because India is losing their talents and who knows one of the brilliant brain among them would never get recognized. Who is losing ? Its India that Losing ?

When the whole world is competing for Innovation, developing new products and for market share, being only as a service based industry will do us no good. Countires like China, are growing on both ends. But their first priority is production not service. They produce innumberble different types of goods that are exported world wide. What does india do in comparision to that, nothing. The only thing that we produce is software and that too not for our internal use, but for US or European nations. How can one country be dependent on other countries for its survival. Isn't it foolishness. I dont understand why so many educated people holding big positions in the Indian government aren't doing anything about it. When there was a sudden IT boom in the country, every tom, dick and harry started doing an engineering course. To help them out the government increased the number of engineering seats. Now its no longer needed to do hardwork to secure a seat in engineering. All one has to do is appear the entrance exam and its done. He/she gets the seat. May not be in a reputed one though but he still becomes an engineer. Students no longer aspire to take up courses in advanced mathematics, chemistry, physics because they know even if they did passout in distinction there is no future for them. So even such students are forced to follow the band wagon. What we are doing is slow poisioning ourselves.

I hope atleast this recession comes as an eye opener for the government and the students. The government should understand that we cannot be dependent on other nations for our employment. we need to create employment for ourselves. When the american markets crashed, indians started losing their jobs and new graduates aren't getting any job in the IT sector for which they have aspired for a long time. Now we are all running towards the government and bank jobs which we were not even bothered about a couple of years ago. But even here we are doing the same mistake, searching for a secure ground. Instead what we can do is realize our inherent talents, hone our skills, understand ourselves and plan for a better future. India needs more enterpreneurs. Young Indians need to come out and start bussinesses. Huge multi national giants like google were started by college graduates only. Government should also ammend their policies, only then there can be a good future for our nation. If we continue to move forward like this, it wont be long before we see our country single and backward when the whole world had moved forward.