Nothing to Envy - Barbara Demick

Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans who defect to South Korea beginning in the late 1990s over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the unchallenged rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population.

Taking us into a landscape most of us have never before seen, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick brings to life what it means to be living under the most repressive totalitarian regime today—an Orwellian world that is by choice not connected to the Internet, in which radio and television dials are welded to the one government station, and where displays of affection are punished; a police state where informants are rewarded and where an offhand remark can send a person to the gulag for life.

Demick takes us deep inside the country, beyond the reach of government censors. Through meticulous and sensitive reporting, we see her six subjects—average North Korean citizens—fall in love, raise families, nurture ambitions, and struggle for survival. One by one, we experience the moments when they realize that their government has betrayed them.

Nothing to Envy is a groundbreaking addition to the literature of totalitarianism and an eye-opening look at a closed world that is of increasing global importance.

Common Challenges for New Managers

Managing new leaders comes with a unique set of challenges. Even the most outstanding individual contributor can struggle as they unpack their new role and tackle their increased responsibilities. Leadership expert Sara Canaday shows how to identify the unique perspectives and challenges of your new managers, set the expectations for their transition, provide coaching and support, and cultivate the right conditions to help them succeed.

• 1. Know Who You Are Managing

Common challenges for new managers


1) they often struggle to balance and prioritize their workloads. They're tempted to do everything they did before they were new leaders, plus their new management duties. They are reluctant to delegate, they want everything to be right, so they try to do it all. That is a fast way for them to become frustrated, overworked, and exhausted.
2) new leaders may find it tough to set boundaries. This is an issue for managers because they're often subject-matter experts, but as a new leader, they cannot continue to be the go-to person for all problems that need troubleshooting. If they make themselves constantly available to answer every functional question, they can't focus on the leadership aspects of their new role. Boundary-setting may also be tough for new leaders who are friends with former peers, who are now direct reports. Pulling back to keep to keep those relationships at a more professional level can seem awkward, but it's important to maintain the objectivity of the position.
3) new leaders may not know how to shift from being a top performer to being able to inspire and motivate top performing teams. Getting results individually is one thing. Getting results with and through other people is a whole different skill set. New leaders may not realize the full importance of coaching and cultivating talent.

They might show signs of behavioral blind spots, areas where their intent doesn't match their impact. For instance, the leaders might think they're being decisive, but their team members might think they're being abrupt, or lets say they go out of their way to be seen as fair, but they end up looking wishy-washy

Take the personalized approach, and your new leaders will quickly become more self-sufficient as managers.


• 2. Set the Expectations

Transition strategy

Five topics you can use as part of your strategy discussions with your new leaders.

1) set the expectations for performance. They'll need to have a solid grasp of the key deliverables and metrics expected from their new teams, the ins and outs of the operations, and the issues surrounding talent management. This is particularly important if new leaders have been promoted from within their teams. They might be used to viewing all those factors from an individual standpoint, but they'll need to step outside of that silo. You'll also want to share with them a clear picture of their targeted goals, how they and their teams will be evaluated.
2) make sure they understand the broader business perspective. Give your new leaders the context to mentally link their team's goals with the overall objectives of the department or the company. They might have a history of being high performers, but they may not immediately see the bigger picture, like how the organization fits into the industry relative to its competitors, or why changing customer demand suddenly requires a new direction. If you can help them to view their leadership roles with a wide-angled lens, they will be more flexible and better prepared to deal with whatever comes their way.
3) ask them to define an action plan for the next three to six months. Talk about their specific plans moving forward to accomplish their goals. These include not only steps to produce actual deliverables, but also ways to advance their leadership skills. Push them to be ambitious, but make sure they're realistic. This would be a great opportunity to show them the value of delegating
4) discuss the best ways for them to prioritize their time. New leaders are probably skilled at completing their own daily assignments, but leadership throws much more complexity into the mix. They need to make sure that they schedule time to accomplish their expanded role within the organization. Their immediate duties have shifted to include more strategic priorities, like building strong relationships and trust with team members, coaching and counseling their direct reports, communicating with peers across lines of business, and thinking more broadly rather than just putting out daily fires.
5) ask the new leaders what they need to make their transitions easier. It's also important to make sure they have resources they can tap into other than you.

Communication guidelines

Need consistent communication. Needs to have the right information at the right time.

First, develop guidelines for their communication with you. What information do you want them to report back to you? Whatever it is, be clear about which updates you want and how often and in what format.
Second, establish expectations for how new leaders will communicate with their own team.
Third, clarify the tone new leaders should use for communication. As they jump into manage their teams they'll probably feel a bit of presser to drive performance, make the quotas, exceed projections.

You're goal is to convey the long-term value in developing real connections with the people that report to them. When they know them and inspire them they can directly influence team performance and building up the bottom line.

• 3. Provide the Appropriate Support

Coaching and development
Be respectful. Coach rather than criticize. Influence rather than inform. Develop rather than direct.
First, observe their leadership skills in action.
Second, schedule periodic one-on-one meetings to discuss their roles. Focus on transition, provide feedback on transition, discuss challenges they might have
Finally, provide them with the tools they need to succeed.

Modeling behavior
Lead by example
Learn much more from seeing how you handle those kinds of situations. Managers who fail to recognize the impact of their own behaviors and the implications of their daily decisions could be creating a problem. Indirect coaching – incredibly powerful
• Do you treat others with respect regardless of their roles or experience level?
• Do you seek out others' feedback and perspective?
• How do you handle difficult conversations and conflicts?
• Do you share credit with others after a team success?

Aligns with your words and your behaviors.
- Do you project confidence in how you speak, dress, and engage with others?
- Do you remain calm and composed in a crisis or when challenged?
- Are you patient and understanding when things don't go as planned?
- Are you perceived by others as influential, as a thought leader?
- Finally, analyze the actual impact of your leadership. Are you having the intended affect on the people you lead? That's the ultimate test.

Your new leaders will be able to read your results a mile away.
* Do the people on your team feel inspired, encouraged, and motivated?
* Do they feel comfortable approaching you?
* Do they feel empowered and valued?
* Do your employees trust and respect you?

Make it a priority to really get to know your new leaders. Building those relationships is the key. That's how you can determine the best way to leverage their strengths and provide targeted development.

The Old Man and The Sea - Ernest Hemingway & Amaram

A couple of years before my sister gifted me this book on my Birthday. Read it, unmoved, in one sitting - as it was a slim novella of 127 pages. But, yes, did wonder - what was in it for being cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to their awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Ernest Hemingway in 1954 and for being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 1953?

At this juncture, cannot get this book out of my head. Simple yet profound. At the outset it is a tale of an old Cuban fisherman Santigao who catches an enormous fish, only to lose it. Hemingway's novella shows how death can invigorate life, how killing and death can bring a man to an understanding of his own mortality -- and his own power to overcome it. The old man dreams his usual dream of lions at play on the beaches of Africa.

Some thoughts:

“But man is not made for defeat," he said. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

“Now is no time to think of what you do not have.
Think of what you can do with that there is”

"And what beat you, the thought"

With 84 days of no success finally Santiago catches a big fist who carries him into the sea. As Santiago sails on with the fish, the marlin’s blood leaves a trail in the water and attracts sharks. Santiago’s continued fight against the scavengers is useless. They devour the marlin’s precious meat, leaving only skeleton, head, and tail. Santiago chastises himself for going “out too far,” and for sacrificing his great and worthy opponent. He arrives home before daybreak, stumbles back to his shack, and sleeps very deeply.

This thought, did not before - but today takes me to the move Amaram. Which is also a story of a fisherman Achootty - but has another story line underneath, which was sentimental and makes you cry. With big dreams and big sacrifice for daughter, who marries a local fisherman, Achooty is misunderstood and doubted to have killed his son-in-law. He brings his SIL back and Achootty takes his boat and ventures into the sea, saying that is the only thing which has loved him unconditionally.

Space To Achieve Endless Possibilites

Space is beautiful! Space is Needed! Space is Possibilities! Space is Powerful! Space is meaningful!

Space is for everyone! Space is to be given! Space is to be respected! Space is your friend!

It's there.

The possibilities are endless.

There are times when an abundance of space is by accident or unintentional or done for convenience or done for money or time constraints.

But that doesn't mean that it is wasted space. An abundance of empty space can be used to create a sense of calm, peace, inaction, or stillness. It can be cold like snow or marble, or creamy like milk. An abundance of empty space can also imply wealth or luxury. Space can also be clean, sacred, or infinite.

And on the other hand, too much space can be lonely or imply poverty, theft, or someone or something lost or missing. There is a lot of meanings that space can take on.

There are different kinds of space, most namely, passive and active space.

A simple example - how comfortable would you be riding or driving, when there is someone sticking onto you?

Nostalgic Memories - Children's day & Handwriting

This Children's day - we get back to the memory lane - at a point when CBSE has removed the Father of nation reference about Gandhiji from text books in schools, and Sixty BJP MPs have requested PM Narendra Modi to designate December 26th as Children's day - Instead of Nov. 14th being Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's birthday. God Bless India.
The story dates back to one VM Kulkarni who was a United Nations Social Welfare Fellow who was carrying out a study on the rehabilitation of children who had been victims of crimes in the UK. He realised that the republic of India(India) has no such mechanism to take of underprivileged children. He got inspired by a fact that in England, June 19, Queen Elizabeth II’s birthday, is observed as Flag Day to raise money for Save the Child Fund and suggested that Jawaharlal Nehru’s birthday too, be observed as Flag Day to raise money. An international fair was organised by the Indian Council for Child Welfare (ICCW) in 1951 and it was in 1951 that the day started being observed as Children’s Day. So not only the first Children’s Day was celebrated on 14th November when Pandit Nehru was alive, it was celebrated after he agreed to the idea.

Nostalgic Memories:

Annual vacations travelling in train with family, friends and cousins, Independence day for mother and fun to be with father – getting in and out at every station. Window view worth fighting for though we preferred upper berth, counting the compartments in the running train, checking weight at railway platform to read the details behind the measurement ticket with all cousins in grandparents’ house, swimming, swinging, plucking mangoes and jackfruits, playing cricket and pranks in ponds and paddy fields, how I wish I have those days again. We would put arms in our shirt and tell people we lost our arms, we swallowed a fruit seed and would be scared to death if a tree would grow in tummy and come out of our mouth, we tried to balance the switch between on and off, we would try to mix coins in carom board, chess, snake and ladder, luddo and cards, when we knew we were going to lose and start again, licking the icecream lid and wishing it never got over and snatching from others, trying to run faster than the moon or our own shadow, going round and round singing: “Ring-a-ring-a-rosies, A pocket full of posies, A tissue, a tissue, We all fall down”

Enjoyed going to 'Thabela' (Dairy farm) and seeing lines of buffalos, and bringing home fresh milk daily. Writing letters on postcards, inlands were interesting. There were phones only in one house somewhere around the corner, and we used to go to somebody's house and watch Chitrahar or P.T. Usha running for Olympics. In case there was something urgent - we used to send telegram. At times there were movies shown in a big white screen or by taking VCR/VCP on rent. We used to divide and share the cost of watching movie.

Ah! Those where the days when for life's simple choices we would just toss a coin and decide with heads/tails and for most complex choices had the simple solutions of Akkad Bakkad Bambey Bo, Asee nabe pure sau, Sau se nikla raja chor pakadke bhaga!

Other Competitions were:

Handwriting Olympiad
Here’s your chance to go back to the memory lane-Back to school. Write the below story (The Thirsty Crow) in a paper with pencil and share a picture with us. The best handwriting gets the reward.

Amazing Calligraphy by Mili - It was both interesting and challenging to write with pencil.





Back to School:

To get dressed in school uniform, with special award to the class (team) picture.

Retail Industry - The Changing Phases

Not long ago, Malls were the modern temples, on the verge of replacing the unorganized retail sectors like the 'kirana' stores, door to door sellers and general stores but also the organised retailers like the hypermarkets, supermarkets and specialty stores. Today, the tug of war is in between both the organised and unorganized put together called the offline market and the online market place that is ready & already have penetrated. We not only have the big sellers like Amazon and Flip-kart, but also many householders turning online marketers, with various modes of sales, including whatsapp.

Like the Telecom sector, Predatory pricing and Deep Discounting has been a norm in FMCG sectors in the past few years. Idea Cellular completed its merger with Vodafone India on 31 August 2018 and thereby became largest telecom company in terms of subscribers and revenue, surpassing Airtel, competing with Jio. The once market leader BSNL has almost become extinct. Business models both in Telecom and FMCG is such that competition is being eliminated. In May 2018, Walmart's largest investment in history was announced with Flipkart in India. Soon after Amazon-Samara Capital had a joint bid to acquire Aditya Birla Retail Ltd that owned 'More' super market' that was ventured in 2007 with the acquisition of Trinethra Super Retail. There were violations to the revised FDI policies, finally Competition Commission of India approved the bid; indicating another mockery of a policy in day light. One interesting point that fascinated me, was both sectors had key industrial player the Birla's and the Ambani's.

Hope our Commerce and Industry minister Piyush Goyal's partnership and working with Current United States Trade Representative, Ambassador Robert Lighthizer bring positive results, given the rift and conflicts today, inspite of the assurance of running e-commerce as an agnostic marketplace, wherein all suppliers get equal opportunity to offer their products and buyers have a choice to buy certain or any products on that marketplace.
There were some complaints about circumvention of the e-commerce policy and multi-brand retail laws, as the Offline market is trying to survive by approaching the customers, brands & the Government through various legitimate forms of protests with the help of associations, meetings. Malls, the modern temples are loosing prominence. Though we do find crowd there, fifty percent of them are window shopping, avoiding the hassles of transportation.

India one of the top three markets in the world has 1.3 billion people and an economy approaching $3 trillion, yet it's eCommerce business is less than 3%. It’s evident that data science and artificial intelligence are the key for the e-commerce industry. Amazon launched robots developed by a US firm known as Kiva Systems, in its warehouses 5 years back in 2014 and later on funded and acquired this company. They further named it as Amazon Robotics. These robots do most of the tasks, from sorting to picking and stacking. Amazon’s drone delivery program, would be delivering packages to customers. For now, India has a huge demand, for people delivering goods, but this should enter India too soon. Flipkart employed little orange cuboids as robots and call them bots or perhaps automated guided vehicles (AGVs), those transfer products within a fenced location bereft of humans. These robots are carrying anything with them, from publications to appliances to mobile phones. Indian e-commerce majors are engrossing the benefits of AI right from customer segregation, sales, and delivery to after-sales and further recommending products to the customers.


This is a period of critical change, the pace and magnitude of our changes are critical to the future as we adapt to an environment that is changing more quickly all the time. As we change, the way we buy, how we work and what we do, it is critical and the need of the hour is to ensure that the automation and ease of operation is spread across all the sectors, and everyone reap the benefit of mechanization. To be precise, it is saddening to see laborer’s still carrying heavy loads for mere wages in construction, farming and some mechanical industries. Hope this sales war boost the economy - and the offline marketers and even other sectors are able to cope up by undoing and redoing to cope up with time.

Eden Walk - Paul Salopek - As I miss our walk

Like others with Paul Salopek's Eden Walk I am pleased to be "reminded that as human beings our journey on Earth is a migration we begin in birth and end in death. The path we take toward our end is one that seems to pull us back to where we started. Along the way, what we learn, what we experience, and what we accomplish all bring us to that place deep inside where we connect with each other. Most of the time I have avoided connecting—fear and other insecurities have been huge obstacles. I am still learning to relish and rely upon that connection."

Every hundred miles Paul Salopek pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets, assembling a global snapshot of humankind. It's so wonderful to read someone who is on a storytelling odyssey across the world in the footsteps of our human forebears. You can read him at nationalgeographic.org - https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk/#section-0
And a brief summary is https://www.newyorker.com/news/out-of-eden/a-twenty-four-thousand-mile-walk-across-human-history

He writes: "Six years into trek, two broad impressions have emerged, at boot level, of this vast world.

First: We’re living in a golden age of human migration.

The second change I sense underfoot.

It is like a tectonic shift—a new geological weight over the horizon that tilts the surface of the planet east.

This is when we have Walks inspiring many to keep on ‘stepping’, as well as to continue to look after physical and mental wellbeing.- interesting ones in office as well - 31 days, 111 teams, 112 million steps, 50,000 miles! and I had some crazy thoughts; running in my head - I got to read about Paul Salopek - Thanks to Sony George for introducing Paul to me. During the walk here an individual who had the highest individual score walked over a phenomenal 1.8 million steps!

The book "Around the world in 80 days" read during school days, made me think it was possible to travel around the world, and was fascinated to learn about day light saving, and how it would work with different timings and climate around. But Walking around the world, and writing it, with such simple words, is really encouraging and enriching.

Hats off to you Paul Salopek...May your tribe increase. Best wishes!

Ente Keralam - Ethra Manoharam

Winston Churchill once said, "The further back you can look, the further forward you are likely to see." Churchill, a student of history, understood that studying the past allows one an educated glimpse into the uncertain future. Celebrating the Kerala Piravi was a time to cogitate if the land of Malabar arose, as a result of Parashuram throwing his axe, why and how did Onam celebration start? On Onam day, we welcome Mahabhali; who was a contemporary ruler during the time of Vamana born before Parashuram in the 8th Canto of Srimad Bhagvatam; and from Dhasavatharam. Possible there could be two theories, first Vamana submerged the land with Mahabali and Parasurama reclaimed the land, second Vamana / Mahabali event occurred near Narmada river, the descendants of Parasurama when they migrated carried the story over to new land reclaimed. According to this version, Thrikkakara temple was consecrated, after a bird sang the story of Mahabali/ Vamana. Kerala was, is and will continue to be an ecologically sensitive area, along with being the doorway to India for varied cultures and races embracing one and all.

It is believed that on the destruction of the First Temple in the Siege of Jerusalem of 587 BCE, some Jewish exiles came to India, they were from King Soloman's time, even before Christ was born. Thomas the Apostle is believed to have brought Christianity to India, in 52 AD; some believe it to be 6th century AD even. Kodungaloor houses the first Muslim mosque in India believed to be build around 629 AD by Cheraman Perumaal, a Hindu king who accepted Islam. Adi Shankaracharya who consolidated the doctrine of Advaita Vedanta is from Kalady in Kerala, the earlier kingdom of Cochin was the only kingdom in South Asia to be a protectorate of China. Buddhists, Arabs, Romans, Portuguese, Dutch and even the British have walked through Muziris, who has stood witness to varied civilisations and wars by being ancient world's greatest trading centre in the East. Trading in everything from spices to precious stones with the Greeks, Romans and the rest of the world. At the time of Independence of India, Maharaja Chithirai Thirunal of Travancore and his Dewan C. P. Ramaswami Iyer toyed with the idea of Travancore as an ­independent nation. on July 25, someone had assaulted Iyer with a knife, and on July 30 the Maharaja informed Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, that he would sign the instrument of accession to India. Kerala Varma Thampuran popularly known as Aikya Keralam Thampuran mooted the idea of a unified Kerala state in India for the Malayalam speaking population and stood for the merging of British Malabar, Cochin and Travancore. Fukyali Kerala (meaning united Kerala), was a popular movement, for the formation of the State of Kerala. On 1 July 1949, Travancore and Cochin merged, Travancore-Cochin State came into existence and Darsanakalanidhi Parikshith Thampuran was the last official ruler of the Cochin princely state. Malabar derived from the Malayalam word "Mala-Baram" (hill-slop or side of hill), earlier refeed to India's Southwest cost from Goa to Kanyakumari; but British Malabar was confined to the present North of Kerala, with minor differences. On 1st Nov. 1956, Kerala Varma Thampuran's dream was fulfilled, these three states were unified and finally the present day Kerala was formed.

Kerala has been, and will be always unique, showing this uniqueness in all spheres, whether it be in politics, culture, social achievements, quality of living, tourism, religious harmony, electoral franchise so on, and so forth. People here wish to be away from main stream pandemonium and wish to be cocooned in their south west India coastal comfy zone, flashy homes earned by sheer individual hard work at home or outside Kerala. Sipping a peg in evening and indulging in conversations, looking mainly on local visual media evening debates and aggressively posting all sorts of comments in social media as well! The greatest ever uniqueness was in 1959, when Kerala elected a communist government through ballotbox, and elsewhere communists came to power through gun barrel. It is fascinating to see Malayalees from rest of India visiting Kerala, more frequently these days, to taste good beef to their fill which makes Kerala the state still enjoying the freedom to eat. How can democracy be justified, when there is a restriction on what one should eat, press has been made parochial. The election results, made us wonder if South will always remain a separate kingdom. When rest of India voted for and arrived at a singularly contentious political party, here it was different; to the extend that the attitude towards the winning party was of anger, sometimes violent dissensus.

Most of food common in rest of India is not popular here especially those made of wheat, festivals like Holi and Diwali are not enthusiastically celebrated in this part of globe though at Trivandrum and Palakkad there is a bit part of national festivity due to the presence of Tamil community. Kerala has her Onam which is celebrated by all irrespective of caste, creed or religion, wherein is her beauty. She has her Kathakali a 400 year old, classical dance form combining facets of ballet, opera, mosque and pantomime explicating events and stories from the Indian epics and puranas, with an unparalled array of colour, music, drama and dance. It is accompanied by facial expressions and sophisticated sign languages, and Mohiniyattam literally interpreted as the dance of Mohini, the celestial enchantress of Hindu mythology noted for its graceful and sensuous movements with no tense footwork, reminds one of the gentle swaying of the green paddy fields and coconut fronds that dot the length and breadth of Kerala. There are many other unique and special art forms too. She has her unique place in sports as well. A race, which teaches a valid management lesson, loved by all is the boat race of Vellam Kalli - filled with songs, rhythm and energy. She would have given maximum number of nurses to the world; for fun, it is said, even if you go to moon, you will find 'Nair's' (The term Nayar is believed to be derived from the word ‘Nayak’ which means a leader of people and is, therefore, allied to the Dravidians term Naicker of Naidu. Some say the word is derived from the term Naga, as the worship of snake has been a characteristic of the community.) tea shop. One of my friends said, if a dog is born, it should be in US, for they are loved so much. So are elephant's in Kerala.



It is the state animal of Kerala and is featured on the emblem of the Government of Kerala. Thrissur being the cultural capital of India, Thrissur Pooram, is an especial events full of elephants. There are very few places in the world as beautiful as Alappuzha, the Venice of the East. Every district here has something special, few being Kottayam the land of 3L's - Latex, Letters and Lakes; wandering through Idukky and Wayanad gives you a feeling of eternal bliss, mesmerizing mother nature, hill stations without railways.

She lets you be you, let us allow her to be her. Let us not destroy the symbolic Chinese fishing nets, her natural beauty, or make Hadiya's out of Akhila's ; let us stop her people including couple and children joining Islamic State, Keep her clean with proper waste management system, complete her development projects on time rather than taking ages and becoming outdated, above all have worthy roads and not repair them when someone meets with an accident. Unfortunately what we have is a vision-less leadership, toothless-law and senseless-people who show no prick of conscience in dumping waste at public places and destroying public property..!! At times wonder where God's own country is heading to?


Being one of her, there is so much more that could be written on Kerala, there would be many with different views, but for me, God's own country,' Ente Keralam' is always 'Manoharam'. My enchanting Kerala, Thank you for all that you have given me.

Marupiravi (Re-incarnation)

It has been raining day and night. As it continue to rain in extravagant tantrum, I stumble upon this:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kochi/why-kochi-figures-in-lonely-planets-worlds-top-10-cities/articleshow/71769490.cms

This reminded me of K. Kunhikrishnan's talk to Malayalam writer Sethumadhavan on the significance of Marupiravi Recreating Muziris. A voyage through history mixed with myths, legends and pure fiction. The characters come and go, cutting across contours of time and space. "The novel opens with a young girl collecting artifacts at Pattanam and concludes with the protagonist hoping the granddaughter takes his writings forward. Significance? The present generation lacks a sense of history and concern for heritage. They live in a florid present without understanding the past. Author attempts to draw them to an undiscovered past, hoping that they will look at our past. Another fascinating thing is that the author has juxtaposed the past and the present with the Vallarpadam terminal symbolising the trade potential of Cochin. History is not a blind alley. It repeats, sometimes in an intriguing way. Wading through the labyrinth of history, the book recapture the past, re-construct it and take it forward. At the end of the novel.

‘എന്ന്നാലും പെട്ടെന്നിങ്ങനെ?’
‘പെട്ടെന്നൊന്നുമല്ല, നൂറ്റാണ്ടുകളുടെ സഹനത്തിനു ശേഷമേ പ്രകൃതി ഇത്തരം കടുംകൈകൾക്ക് മുതിരുകയുള്ളൂ. അന്ന് ഞാൻ പറഞ്ഞത് പോലെ കടലും കരയും തമ്മിലുള്ള നിലയ്ക്കാത്ത പോര്. കര കാക്കാൻ മനുഷ്യർ മറക്കുമ്പോൾ കടൽ അതിന്റെതായ വഴികൾ കണ്ടെത്തുന്നു.’
~ സേതു, ‘മറുപിറവി’

Problem Solving

Problems are an Opportunity to develop ourselves. Solving it involves two parts:
1) Creativity – Generate Options
2) Decision Making – Select the best options

Team decision – Ask everyone’s view/help, consider all the potential risks.

• 1. Identify the real problem

What's causing the problem
Knowing the cause is the key – At times there could be more than one cause – and at times we might have more than one effect. Eg. Beach drowning/ high icecream sale – not related but real reason is hot weather.
Get list of possible causes; find the real one and work on fixing it.

1. Asking the five whys

The problems may be like a tree, or a circle . If a circle it is not easy to break the loop. Bad manager will fix the surface problem. Good ones will get into the root cause.

2. The Kepner-Tregoe process
Situation -) Problem -) Cause -) Solution -) Select -) Risk

Find when does it happen and when it doesn’t happen? Try swaping

3. Pareto analysis
80-20 rule. Eradicate 20% problem, will save 80% cost. Find and tackle top ones.

4. Look at the whole system
Book – ‘Why things bite back?’; ‘The 5th discipline’. The illusion of control. Managers are just a cog in the machine. Stand back and try to analyze the system as a whole.
Systems = Feedback loops + Time delays

• 2. Generate Possible Solutions

1. Fast and slow thinking

Intuitive or logical – slowly nibble.

2. Brainstorming

Group brainstorming gets many ideas – write all ideas. Keep the momentum coming. Let go of ownership.
Use both sides of the brains. Some just suggest ideas, and some judge them. Let all do, everything – but in steps- first get ideas from all don’t judge. Then judge all together.

3. Mind maps
Start from middle. Use paper in landscape. Use colour. Use a white board. Use ipads. Helps note making, and explaining to others. Limitation in case you have multiple Causes and multiple solutions. – A picture.

4. Decision trees

Have timelines.

Boost your creativity
Consider reversal
Use adjective
Apply what if scenario
Sleep on it.
Combine variables – create metrics
Talk to other people
Keep going
Develop, silly, fun solutions.
Chunk up or down.

• 3. Selecting the Best Solution

1.Intuition and logic
So, the first principle is that you should think about both head and heart, both logic and your intuition, and that they should agree. If not, you need to do more thinking. One of them must be wrong. So the more you can use both halves of the equation the better. And what about you? Are you a logic person who could maybe give their intuition more of a chance?

2. How to view the options
At least ask yourself, "How do I feel about "what the numbers are telling me? "Could they be wrong?" Or are you more of an intuition type of person who could maybe benefit from doing a few numbers?

3. Rating charts
Put in tabular form and discuss with group. A comparison chart typically has columns for the strengths and weaknesses of each idea .


4. Don't settle for second best
Make decisions – Must haves, Nice to haves,

- Something that often gets forgotten is that choosing between options isn't always the answer. What if none of the options is really good enough? An example of this would be recruiting a person. What if the best candidate is okay? In fact, quite good, but not excitingly brilliant? A friend of mine calls these people the Forty Percenters. Not bad enough to fire, but not really good enough, either. Should we give them the job if we really need someone?

And if the solution that you're considering is missing even one of the must-haves, then it's not good enough and the search must start again. even if one of your candidates has all of the must-haves, they might still not be good enough because they have very few of the additional nice-to-haves. And this is something that you have to decide, ideally before your interviewing process.

5. Risk analysis

It will almost always be the case that the more risky options will have higher payoffs, because you wouldn't consider a more risky option unless it was higher paying.

the easiest way to allow for risk in your calculations is to multiply the value of the expected outcome by the risk. The expected value is the amount you'll get if you succeed multiplied by the probability.

6. Team decisions

The wisdom of the crowd – Better to consult, more people you ask, better answer.
Involve as many people as you can in your decisions, especially if they involve judgment or estimation of numbers. But make sure that they either don't confer or if they do, that you don't get risky shift. Counter this by having a black hat wearer, asking everyone what they think, and having a separate section on what might go wrong.

7. Sensitivity
Sensitivity is the risk that your estimates are wrong, and to what degree that matters.

8. The sunk cost paradox

The time you've put into relationships, the time you've put into projects, the money you've put into advertising and marketing. If it's not working, you should cut your losses now. The correct decision-making process is to think only about going forward starting from now. What's the cost of the time and the money that I need to put in and what's the benefit that I will get out?

Only what will happen going forward is what matters.

9. Framing – subconscious and deliberate
The word framing comes from our frame of reference. We can't help seeing the Sun set from our frame of reference, even though we know the Sun isn't moving, it's the Earth that's rotating really. And in the same way, we look at things from the point of view of ourselves, or our department, or our organization, or our country, and this can bias our decision making and perhaps make us take the wrong decisions.
Look for neutral words.
Always compare options using the same way of measuring them. For example, either looking at the chance of success, or looking at the chance of failing
when we frame options we have to make sure that we don't compare gaining in one option with losing in another, because the losing one will tend to have more weight and especially so if you're a risk averse person

10. Four simple rules for decision making

1) Does’nt really matter: If the decision is very close, then it doesn’t matter which option you choose. – only tragedy is if you don’t choose any. - The two paths that your life will take are going to be different, but both will be fine, so it doesn't matter.
2) Toss a coin but be prepared to ignore: because they're equal, then just get the coin out and do it. - And the weird thing is, that as the coin is in the air, you sometimes find yourself hoping for one of the options. In which case, ignore the coin and choose that. Or, once the coin lands, you find yourself either glad or disappointed, in which case, ignore the coin and choose the one that you've discovered that you really want. If you feel no emotions as the coin spins, or your emotions continue to pull you in both ways equally, then go with the coin.
3) Take the simplest solution:
4) Delegate the decision. - whatever happens, you want them to be motivated to carry out the decision, so give it to them if you're 50/50 about the choice.

11. Consider implementation
Always consider the implementation as well as the solution itself.

Transformation

Transformation is good for companies, and people that go broad, move fast and renew often, priorities health and keep stretching the aspiration. Transformation is an intense, well-managed, organization-wide program, to enhance performance and boost organizational health. The result should always be measured.

1. Go big, Go broad. The most successful transformations are often the broadest and impact the whole business;
2. Move Fast, Renew often.
3. Embrace Organizational Health
2. Stretch your aspirations. Targets should be stretching to drive success.

Coaching Employees through Difficult Situations

Have you ever had to provide coaching to an individual who can't take criticism, or inherited an employee who seems to continually make the same mistakes on the job? Part of growing as a leader is learning how to successfully tackle these and other challenging situations. In this course, leadership consultants Lisa Earle McLeod and Elizabeth McLeod help new and experienced managers address some of the most frequent coaching challenges. Using scenarios, Lisa and Elizabeth demonstrate how to motivate employees who have been demoted or promoted, as well as how to effectively coach employees who have big egos or simply don't want to be coached. In addition, they share strategies for using supplemental resources to further your coaching efforts.
Learning Objectives:
• Define coaching.
• Describe the foundation for successful coaching.
• Explain how to coach someone who is older than you.
• Articulate how to coach someone who makes excuses.
• Identify how to coach poor performers or bad communicators.

• 1. Foundations for Successful Coaching
What is coaching?

- Coaching is not cheerleading; it's leadership. And it's not about standing on the sidelines, and barking orders. It's about teaching skills and improving mindset to make meaningful improvements in performance. It's easy to walk around, putting out fires and directing behavior, but coaching has a bigger longterm payoff. Coaching will give you a much more resilient and confident team, and a team that can function even when you're not there to call the shots.

A foundation for successful coaching
1. Empathy
2. Accountability
3. Understanding
• 2. Situational Scenarios
Coaching someone who is older than you
1. Validate the other person
2. Compliment them
3. Build your own credibility – Don’t get defensive
4. Deal with the original issue
Coaching when someone is passed over for promotion
1. Address the problem proactively
2. Put yourself in their team
3. Validate the other person
4. Give opportunity to grow
Coaching someone who has been promoted

1. Validate the other person
2. Raise awareness between past role and present
3. Coach
Coaching someone who didn't get enough training
Training is skill based; coaching is for personal development
1. Let them know you want to help them to be successful
2. Offer additional training
3. Position yourself as the coach

• 3. Attitudinal Scenarios
Coaching someone who makes excuses
• Open with a question
• Acknowledge the pattern of excuses
• Reinforce the importance of positive behavior
Don’t debug every excuse, but the habit.
Coaching someone who doesn't want to be coached
Successful coaches offer support, are trusted, take things one step at a time.
• Establish yourself as a supporter
• Make one suggestion
• Offer a compliment
Stay respectful and offer support
Coaching someone who has a big ego
People do not need to accurately assess themselves in order to imrove
1. Acknowledge something positive
2. Frame improvement as good to great
3. Get agreement to a tactical next step

Coaching someone who can't take critique
• Begin with a compliment
• Give an example of what good looks like
• End on a positive

• 4. Behavioral Scenarios
Coaching someone who is a poor performer
Ask to improve one specific important skill – eg. Efficiency, Skills are not linear.
Coaching someone who is a bad communicator
• Share one strategy
• Provide a relevant example
• Offer a winning strategy
Coaching someone who keeps making the same mistakes
Break down skills into manageable tasks.


• 5. Ongoing Coaching
Suggesting resources
• To do skills training
• Relationship development – Peer coaching
• Require self study – Every Friday 2 hours study, and share with others.
When to give up on coaching – R.O.C – Return on Coaching
Don’t let sunk cost let you make wrong decision . Measure ROC
1. Manageable steps
2. Tools
3. Clear expectations
4. Feedback
5. Outside training
6. Internal experts
You have got only one you, Make sure you are spending your time wisely.

• Conclusion

- If you take nothing else from this course, know this. Coaching doesn't always have to be a formalized 12-step process with a lot of deliverables. - No, it doesn't. Effective coaching can be short, intentional conversations you have with your team during day to day business. - It takes some work from you on the front end, but when you do this well, your time investment pays off 10 fold down the road. - Use coaching as a way to build those soft skills, and increase the confidence of your team. - So they can operate smoothly and efficiently when aren't there to hold their hand. - If you want to learn more about coaching or even get coached by us, you can follow us on LinkedIn or connect with us through our website. - Coaching is about having lots of meaningful conversations, and, yes, sometimes they're challenging conversations. - But it's an investment you make over time, and one with big payoffs in the long run.

Let your life fall into your hands - Recognise and greet it

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worth of rescue.

~Martha Postlewaite

Building Self-Confidence

Confidence is crucial to personal and professional success. People who aren't confident tend to miss out on new challenges, relationships, and opportunities. The good news is self-confidence is self-perpetuating; once you develop it, confidence can buy you from one situation to the next. In this course, author and educator Dr. Todd Dewett shares simple and practical techniques to build and maintain self-confidence. He teaches you how to own the situation, embrace your imperfections, and take action to move forward. Then he covers how to sustain your confidence, interaction after interaction, by aligning with the right people, maintaining a positive perspective, and putting together a plan.

Build confidence

- Here's a question. What do you do with a valuable asset, like a home or a car? You protect it and invest in it when needed, right? Self-confidence is one of your most precious assets, so you have to protect it and invest in it correctly. This course will help you do exactly that. You'll learn to own your situation, embrace your imperfections, define a new path forward, and you'll learn how to embrace positivity. All of that means stronger self-confidence.

Own the situation
- The first step towards improving how you handle self-confidence involves learning to own the situation. This just means you'll strive to understand and except the fact that ultimately you are responsible for how you feel about yourself. Sometimes a similar reaction happens but in the opposite direction. You find yourself questioning your abilities, but instead of feeling self-pity or some other negative thought about yourself, you look at others. Maybe you decide you feel this way only because of your abrasive colleague, or that completely unreasonable boss, or maybe that client who is never happy. That's called blame, and blaming never solves anything. It does, however, give you an excuse to not fully own your contribution to how you feel, so be careful. All right, to own your situation means that you must embrace a policy of personal responsibility. Know that you are driving progress in your life. This approach ensures that you are your biggest advocate for change and improvement, and that your growth isn't really dependent on others. Excepting this idea seriously increases your odds of maintaining strong self-confidence over time. However, I do want to remind you to be careful. Taking ownership and being responsible does not mean that you should blame yourself or be overly critical of yourself. No self-pity allowed. When your self-confidence takes a hit, never begin by thinking that you are the one and only reason for what happened. Remember, that every outcome is the result of multiple factors, you're only one. Besides, if you overindulge in negative thoughts about yourself, it becomes easier to make the same choice in the future. Okay, you've accepted responsibility, and I do know that can feel like a burden sometimes. So, I want you to do two quick things. The first is to acknowledge your self-worth. You are valuable, you're a unique person with a lot to offer given all of your experience, education, and training. You work hard, you're creative, you're a good colleague, and you've had a few recent wins at work. It only takes a couple of minutes to remind yourself that no matter how the current situation feels, you are a highly value-added person who will bounce back. Second, you must commit to getting stronger. I don't want you to believe in personal responsibility without also spending some time thinking about how you will work to maintain a healthy level of self-confidence. This means a focus on the behaviors that will help you achieve this goal. Every great goal needs a clear plan, so now it's time to start working on yours. There you have it. Stop looking elsewhere so you can look right in the mirror at yourself. When you really own how you feel, remember your self-worth and commit to getting better. Well, that's when you're ready to start building more self-confidence.

Embrace the imperfection
- All human beings are deeply imperfect and yet most of us spend a lot of energy denying it. I understand. We don't wish to be defined by failure or to have people think about our imperfections. True, but carving out time to think about this reality, and how to use it, is actually essential for strong self-confidence. There are a few things that make all of us human. We all breathe, we eat, we grow mentally and physically and yes, along the journey we all experience challenging learning moments. It's expected. I mean, sure when a mistake happens it hurts for a while, but don't forget that this has been experienced by literally everyone around you. Step one is to be honest about your imperfection. I know you've worked hard. I appreciate all of your degrees, promotions and accolades, but accomplishing all of those things wasn't easy, wasn't it? Of course not. Along the way you made a few mistakes and experienced one or more failures. That's normal. So next it's time to realize that mistakes are a potent fuel that drives your learning and growth. Any form of mistake or failure is really just a type of feedback pointing you in a more productive direction, if you're paying attention. The process goes like this: You create an error or some type of setback, you then experience negative feelings, this is followed by critical feedback, whether that's from an upset client or your boss, and this, of course, creates even more negative feelings. Predictably, self-confidence sinks. Okay, now what? It's time to make a choice. You can put this incident in the back of your mind and ignore it or you can make the choice to allow this incident to become a genuine learning moment. However, do keep things in perspective. Some skills matter more than others, so when you make a mistake, whether that has to do with your understanding of a particular software program or maybe presentation skills, who knows, you should try to make amends. But then you have to ask yourself these questions. In general, how important is this skill for professionals? More specifically, will this skill be important for your career in the next few years? Finally, is there anyone on the team who's better suited to handle this issue because of their skill set? If the issue is important and you personally will be required to master this skill, well, it's time to start thinking about the right educational activities. If however, the skill is of minor importance and you really don't expect to rely on it, well, then there's no need for a plan. Just move forward and use your limited skill building time on areas that really matter. Sometimes being face-to-face with our imperfections hurts self-confidence, but now you know they can actually become catalysts for stronger self-confidence. So the next time things don't go quite right choose to smile and start thinking about what you can learn that will help you next time.

Articulate a path forward
- When you find yourself not feeling confident, don't wait long before you choose to do something about it. First, give yourself a deadline, a time when you will stop accepting your current level of self-confidence and begin working on ways to improve the situation. Think in terms of hours or days, not weeks or months. Second, you have to make a plan. Let me share a simple structure that will be helpful. It's all about goals. Goals work because they direct and focus your attention on outcomes that you value. If you want to think about building self-confidence, let's think about levels of goals. You want to get back in the business of achievement, but you need an approach that works for someone who's struggling with self-confidence. So let's start small. First, consider a classic small win. A small win is an easily-definable task to be completed that you don't expect to be particularly difficult. This is the equivalent of getting back on your bike after falling off. It's a small step that puts you firmly back on a path towards being productive and feeling more self-confident. It could be as simple as a goal to end the weekly management meeting on time for once, or maybe you need to reconnect with someone in your network. Just remember, defined, simple, reachable. That's a solid short-term win. After a few small wins, you'll be ready for the smart goal. As most of you already know, that stands for specific, measurable, aligned, reachable, and time-bound. If you're not familiar with the idea, you can spend just a few minutes on the internet to find plenty of quality descriptions, but the point here is that we're getting larger in size and you're working on them over the course of many months, or maybe a year or more. But we're not quite done. After a few small wins and a good smart goal or two, then it's time to remember the biggest goals. Some people call them BHAGs, or big hairy audacious goals. But to keep it simple, I'll just say, don't forget to dream. When confidence takes a hit, we can become too worried and too risk-averse. Those big long-term goals can feel daunting, and somehow outside of our reach. But they're not. So dream, dreams tap our imagination and help us feel purpose. Listen, no matter why it is that you find yourself questioning your confidence, you can take steps to improve how you feel. Start right now. Admit you need a plan. Grab a small win, define a few smart goals and don't forget to take time on occasion to dream. That's a productive path forward that's very likely to boost self-confidence.

Manage your context
- Understanding self-confidence requires you to think about how you interact with your environment every day. Think about your major social interactions at work. The truth is that you bring as much positive mental energy to the office as you can, but then during the day, some people improve how you feel, and well, others don't, so let's think about how people affect you. Here's what I want you to do. Make a list of the people you see the most, regularly, every week. Now, split that group into two by creating a net positive group and a net negative group. The positive list is full of people who tend to be congenial and helpful, while the other list is populated by people who cause you excessive stress due to negative chemistry or behaviors. Now, I'm not naive, I know you can't completely control who you see and when, however, when you scrutinize your work, the meetings and all the other interactions, you're likely to find opportunities to increase the time you spend with the positive folks and decrease how much you give to the more negative people. Remember that how you feel is an asset, so you have to learn to protect it. Next, think about using your time more strategically. Again, just to keep this simple, think about your most important tasks every week, the tasks and projects that are vital to the team or viewed as important by your boss or clients. Then you have the easy stuff, the boring data manipulation, the paperwork, the drudgery. Turns out, people often take refuge in the smaller, easier tasks because they're easy and they won't cause a headache. Unfortunately, that typically means you get behind on the work that matters. Here's what you do. Always start the day with meaningful work, not the easy stuff. Real progress first, easy tasks later. And then, for at least one week, I want you to keep track of how much time you spend on really meaningful work versus easier, more routine aspects of the job. A strong majority of your time should be spent on things that matter. Just becoming aware of how you allocate your time will help you shift in a productive direction. Okay, the last tip I have for you is to invest in how you present yourself. There's a connection between our self-confidence and our daily attire and grooming. There is no perfect solution here, but generally, people feel better when they invest time to look better, however they might define that. For one person that might be shaving and wearing a tie, and for someone else, maybe it's a new hairstyle or an amazing pair of shoes. The connection is real, so take a minute and think about how you want to look. Ready to get started? Alright, name the one person with whom you should interact with less next week, and the one task that's taking up too much of your time. Start planning now to address these issues. Soon enough, you'll have optimized the context around you, making it easier to build and maintain self-confidence.

Feed your positivity
- Being positive is hugely important. When you feel positive, everything else somehow seems easier and more manageable. As your belief in your ability grows, so does your self-confidence. So your goal is to be thoughtful about how you intentionally feed your positivity. One classic and very effective practice is visualizing your achievement. For any professional, this is a behavior you should engage every day for just a moment or two. Find a quiet place and then identify one or two goals, things you begun but not yet completed. Now imagine yourself getting to the finish line. See it as if you're watching a movie. Wrapping up the final details, turning in the work, or nailing the presentation. Imagine that smile on your supervisor's face. See yourself looking and feeling great. Now that's definitely worth 30 seconds of your time every day. Another great tip involves how you choose to think and talk to yourself when your self-confidence feels threatened. When one of those moments arrives, I want you to be ready. Here's a quick checklist to keep you thinking positive. The first step is to recognize what it is you're feeling and thinking. Admit it, your confidence is shaken, it happens. Next, remind yourself that this feeling is temporary, it'll pass. Then, clearly state that whatever it is that made you feel this way does not define you. Now, continue by reciting a few of your recent highlights, the wins, the happy customers, the promotions, and so on. This is good evidence that you clearly add a lot of value. Run through that script once or twice, and your self-confidence will swing back in a positive direction. One of my favorite positivity tips is to connect with someone who lifts your spirits. We all know this person. They might be someone you admire, someone who makes you laugh, or a kind voice who is always uplifting. Call them and check in for a few minutes. You're not looking for counseling, just a fun, lighthearted exchange. You see, when you proactively connect with this type of person, tension quickly fades away. They help you remember to seek and embrace positivity, and your self-confidence gets an instant boost because this person so clearly believes in you. So take time to connect. One last thought, as you begin to recover from a moment that shakes your self-confidence, remember the need to celebrate. Successful actions that move you away from a negative space should be celebrated. Maybe it's just a small internal congratulations you offer yourself, or possibly a coffee drink from your favorite cafe. Keep it small, but do it. Each time you take steps past a mental impasse towards a healthy mindset, that next small win or that next big goal, that's something worth celebrating. Follow these tips and you're likely to stay positive. And you can start right now. Can you name one clear way you will boost your positivity in the next few days? Sure you can, and now you're on your way.

Put together your plan
- Okay, so we've set the stage for building your confidence and offered tools for you to use, but how do you bring the new, confident you into the world? I want you to do three things. First, you need a small win. What one thing can you start doing now that will boost your self-confidence? It might be choosing to attend a particular meeting at work, or choosing to not attend. Or it could be as simple as reaching out to bring someone amazing back into your life. Nail one small win to help you light that fire for improvement. Next, I want you to talk to your mentor. If you don't have one, you should make it a priority. I want you to confess to them that you struggle with this issue. Explain why to the extent that you're clear about how you're feeling and ask for their thoughts. Then, be quiet and listen. Many times, even with sensitive issues like self-confidence, their wisdom might save you a lot of time. Finally, consider adopting one small new behavior to reinforce your new path. It's like a symbol for letting go of the past. Who knows? Maybe you'll finally switch from your day planner to a digital calendar. Well, then tossing that old thing in the trash can symbolize that the past is gone. Another great example is changing your work routine. Routines eventually become ruts. So one nice symbolic way to embrace a new path is to change your routine. For example, you will no longer eat lunch at the same time every day in the same place with the same people. It's time to mix it up. In the end, while it's true that self-confidence is somewhat driven by your personality, it's vital to remember that it can also be viewed as a skill. Give this advice a chance and start building that skill today. Good luck.

Finance & Accounting - The Shifting Mandate

Three decades ago, we celebrated when the Trial Balance, and Balance sheet would tally. We would manually write Journal Entries, Post Leaders, create Trial Balance and Balance Sheet. Generation today, might not even know what tallying a Trial Balance or for that matter what even a Trial Balance is, except for something that they would have studied in some accounting book. A typical accounting office was filled with books, papers, files and dust.

With Technology, and ERP's in place, slowly, things started getting automated, and the number of books and papers around started reducing. Office became partially paperless; outsourcing, offshoring, and shared services started becoming very popular. ERP's like JD Edward, SAP, Oracle, People soft took care of Accounting, there were Data storage systems like Hyperion, Crest etc. and reporting tools like COGNOS, Essbase. This enabled moving activities to a central location, as businesses started growing global and so was born shared service centre.

I ) Shared Service Centre's:

During initial days in setting up of SSC (Shared Service Centre), the main objective was Cost Reduction. SSCs since then have evolved and focus has shifted from cost reduction to best-in-class unit within an organization. Best-in-Class includes rendering service with efficiency improvement, automation of processes, Service Level Agreement for various processes and become a strategic value/finance partner for the company. The 3 main phases of SSC are as under:
Phase I - Setup and stabilization phase - during initial 1-2 years company will have 10-15% of cost savings due to consolidation of resources, giving up space at each Business Unit (BU), multitasking of resources among others.
Phase 2 – Development Phase – during 3-6 years of functioning of SSC there will be further cost saving of almost 15-20% (hence by end of 6th year of SSC the total cost saving will be in the range of 25-35%). Further the below benefits will accrue to the organization as a whole; Greater knowledge of processes and improving the activities for increased efficiencies; Turning data into analytics for the organization to take informed decisions (like spend analytics, supplier groupings, reduced procurement cost, improved coordination among BU’s); Better productivity and stronger controls (mitigation of risks); Sharing of best practices.
Phase 3 – World Class Operations phase – from year 7 onwards, the SSC will function at the best in class level. This will involve, automation of processes, real time dashboard of health of SSC, contribution of SSC towards organizational goals, integration of all functions to work seamlessly. Additionally the SSC and organization can have following achievements; SSC able to generate revenue by charging to BU’s for the services provided; have a robust SLA in place which measures the performance; Can be spin-off as a separate entity and provide service to larger industry; Should be able to cater to international BU’s (global scale of operations); Digitization of work flow (paper-less processing); Robotics Process Automation.

II) Outsourcing: Make or Buy:

Examining the relevant costs of keeping activities in-house versus outsourcing, organisations capitalise on the expertise of another company that is more efficient, effective, or knowledgeable at performing a specialized task that is peripheral to the firm's core business competencies which help them to focus on strategic revenue-generating activities. We have global firms, providing specialized services in implementing new technology, managing change, even for the Finance and Accounts activities both onshore and offsite, rendering the book closure with improved quality and timeliness. This do come with knowledge "give-away", confidentiality issues, limited flexibility, reduced quality control and lessened process control to name a few.



III) Changing Technology - Upgrade:

The current business environment is complex and uncertain. Yet in the midst of it, many enterprises are finding and harnessing opportunities to compete and grow. This is having a particular impact on CFOs and their teams. Given all the M&A activity, boards are insisting that finance expand its focus and priorities beyond the bottom line. Boards expect CFOs to become strategic partners supporting enterprise strategy and driving growth – while managing risk and compliance, market volatility, and creative destruction. And they are seeking ones who embrace new ways of working. F&A teams across industries are combining digital technologies and analytics with new skills and capabilities to turn finance into a strategic partner. This empowers workforce, rethinks compliance, and delivers accurate forecasts and performance insights that shape business decisions. Digital and Analytics, Business process automation and robotics, Machine languages - help access state of the art techniques. Today, AI can review large data sets to connect the dots, identify patterns,and easily produce results and new intelligence. With AI performing more time-consuming transactional work, F&A teams can use the analysis and insight to get better outcomes. This is augmented intelligence – where the combination of human with machine intelligence delivers real business results, such as growth, profitability, competitive advantage, and customer satisfaction. AI can take on transactional work and elevate F&A personnel in areas like invoice exceptions in accounts payable. While robotic process automation (RPA) is effective at rules-based, high-volume automation, such as supplier invoice and receipt matching, there are exceptions where a bot can't finish the job. By analyzing structured and unstructured data, both internal and external, AI also surfaces insights that can make decisions more accurate. With a centralized data foundation, different functions and people work with the same, consistent data sets. But you also need people with data engineering and master data management skills to create and maintain the pipelines going into the lake so that your data is clean and comprehensive. AI bias can creep in when decisions made by AI reflect the conscious or unconscious values of the people who designed it or data it's based on, for example, when finance teams make decisions on customers' credit or payment terms. Applying AI to F&A creates new demands for teams with both business and technical skills. People need industry and functional knowledge to provide essential context and review algorithms. Advanced teams are even hiring behavioral scientists and anthropologists. But they also need technical skills, such as forecasting, data scientists, and engineers, analytics, design thinking, and agile programming. Once you have the right people, they need the right infrastructure to work with. With easy access to intuitive technology at home, a workplace with outdated, clunky systems won't encourage them to stay.

Rather than redesigning entire systems and processes, you can take a modular approach using pretrained AI accelerators. Find solutions that use insights unique to your industry and can plug and play into core business processes to improve experiences, accuracy, and efficiency at previously impossible speeds. Anyone who has deployed a large-scale, transformative financial system such as Workday Financial Management will tell you about the pressure they faced to prove the business value of the investment. So what do you need to get the full benefits of your Workday Financial Management solution?
1. Focus on speed from the outset: Your leadership team will no longer wait 12 to 24 months for payoff. They need to see it now. But you should plan this payoff well ahead of any investment. It can't be an afterthought.
2. Align platform design to your business needs: Powerful platforms can only prove their worth if they're designed to meet your business' needs and are based on your team's skills.
3. Focus on quick implementation: As soon as you design your solution, you need to have it up and running quickly.
4. Look outside the business for expert skill sets: We all have skills shortages in the workplace – getting the right talent can be time-consuming and costly. Identify the gaps you have and ways to fill them. Harness the existing talent, and help them grow, by providing necessary training.

The Workday EIB (Enterprise Interface Builder) is an easy to use tool, not needing any coding that supplies users with both a guided and graphical interface which can supplement programming and is not a replacement. Developers use EIBs to insert simple components into their larger code and for recording different types of data. The two primary options are outbound EIBs and inbound EIBs. An outbound EIB withdraws data from a specific source and then saves extracted data for further use or sends it to be processed. The majority of outbound EIBs use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to transfer data. An inbound EIB rather than using FTP, transfers data directly, are extremely simple to use and have friendly interfaces that are modeled on familiar items, like spreadsheets which allows for quick adoption. Along with this, one might need to have support from 3rd party, cloud connect, and a bit of manual intervention too; but the use of devises which was equivalent to a weapon for an accountant like calculators and macro enabled spreadsheets, has been considerably reduced.

Maximizing the benefit of your Workday investment does not need to be complicated. The Cloud Based technology, help you access the data on your go, even on your mobile. No more papers, sleepless nights to get your Balance Sheet right, have different systems for ERP, Consolidation of reports etc.; you can have all under one roof, easily accessible from anywhere at anytime; even linking HR and Finance data.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness - Arundhati Roy

After 20 years of her Booker winning debut novel, here is her second; where the narrative spans across decades and locations, but primarily takes place in Delhi and Kashmir and characters run the gamut of Indian society including an intersex woman (hijra) Anjum, a rebellious architect Tilottama, and her landlord who is a supervisor in the intelligence service. The two central stories never convincingly come together.

Anjum a muslim, has both male and female genitals, but was raised as a boy, she is born as Aftab, the long-awaited son of Jahanara Begum and Mulaqat Ali. . In her adolescence she leaves her family to live as a woman and joins a haveli filled with other intersex and trans people. They are a collective and family and become even more so when Anjum adopts an abandoned child named Zainab. When she takes this three-year old girl in: “Her body felt like a generous host instead of a battlefield.” It’s so beautiful and moving the way this individual whose family feel disgraced by her and who is scorned by the majority of society finds a way to pour her love into caring for someone instead of allowing herself to be crippled by being branded as a hijra outcast. However, we quickly learn that in her later years Anjum leaves her haveli called Khwabgah (the House of Dreams) to live in a graveyard where she gradually establishes a home for herself and eventually forms a community of individuals displaced by social conflict. She has a wonderfully unprejudiced view when taking people in stating: “I don’t care what you are… Muslim, Hindu, man, woman, this caste, that caste, or a camel’s arsehole.”

On her visit to a Gujarati shrine, Anjum gets caught in a massacre of Hindu pilgrims and subsequent government reprisals against Muslims. She is anxious about the future of her own community, especially the new generation. Zainab is brought up at Khwabgah and later goes on to become a fashion designer who marries Saddam.

Roy introduces a dizzying array of people all connected with particular political movements, social clashes or devastating disasters. These centre largely around a location of vast protest called Jantar Mantar. In the centre of this vast amount of voices of dissent, a baby is abandoned and kidnapped. Who this baby is, where she came from, why she was left and what happened to her is gradually explained over a few hundred pages. But built around her story are the tales of people still caught within the repercussions of Partition, national/religious battles and especially the conflicts within Kashmir, the northernmost part of the Indian subcontinent. The novel mostly focuses on a group of people who knew each other in childhood and worked together in a theatrical production in their youth, but have gone on to take different sides in the political struggles.

There is no grudging marriage of art and politics in her work; as John Berger, one of her longtime interlocutors and a formative influence, wrote, “Far from my dragging politics into art, art has dragged me into politics.” Roy’s work conveys a similar spirit. She is a great admirer of the world. Her strongest writing is always at the margins of the main story—the pleasure of finding “an egg hot from a hen,”. From the fine-grained affection that stirs her imagination springs an ethical imperative—after all, how can one appreciate the world without desiring to defend it? And it must be defended not merely from war or political calamity, but from that natural, more insidious phenomenon: forgetting. This is the literary tradition that Roy belongs to—and that was intimately transmitted to her by Berger and her other great friend, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (she has called him her twin), for whom the great tragedy of humanity wasn’t that we die or suffer or make each other suffer. It was that we forget. And because we are so prone to forgetting—because it is so easy to make us forget—we accept the conditions of our suffering as inevitable and cannot fathom alternatives. (“The world, which is the private property of a few, suffers from amnesia,” Galeano once said. “It is not an innocent amnesia. The owners prefer not to remember that the world was born yearning to be a home for everyone.”)

Tilottama (With shades of her) is a student at the Architecture School who is estranged from her Syrian Christian mother - Mariyam Ipe.
Tilo becomes friends with three men - Musa Yewsi, Nagaraj Hariharan and Biplab Dasgupta whom she meets while working on sets and lighting design for the play Norman, Is That You? directed by David Quartermaine. Nagaraj Hariharan, Cast as Norman in the play. He later becomes a top-notch journalist who works in Kashmir. Tilo marries Naga as suggested by Musa for strategic reasons and later abandons him. Musa Yeswi (Commander Gulrez) Musa is a reticent Kashmiri man who is classmates with Tilo in Architecture School and her boyfriend. Musa later returns to his homeland to become a militant and fight for Azadi. Musa marries Arifa and fathers Miss Jebeen the First. Biplab Dasgupta - Biplab was to play the role of Garson Hobart in the play Norman, Is That You?. He later works for the Intelligence Bureau as Deputy Station Head for. Biplab secretly loves Tilo and rents her room after she walks out on Naga.

The author weaves together a dazzling narrative nearly as complex as the reality of the fallout of the bloody partition by forcing her characters through themes of Hindu nationalism and Kashmiri separatism and exposing them to atrocities like the 1969 Gujarat riots, the most deadly incident of Hindu-Muslim violence since the 1947 divide, until the 1989 Bhagalpur riots.

It charts their various romances, quests for revenge and how they’re helplessly drawn into conflicts that seem to have no end. The story goes all over the place. There is near-total confusion about point of view.

"Yellow mustard flowers sprouting from a corpse’s clenched fist, which symbolizes resilience and hope amid violence and grief" 

“Still the Amaltas bloomed, a brilliant, defiant yellow. Each blazing summer it reached up and whispered to the hot brown sky, Fuck You.” — another striking image of defiant natural beauty 

amidst turmoil 

Do these refer to Kani Konna (Cassia fistula) flower or something else?

A poem tucked into the pages of Roy’s novel seems to encapsulate the author's own intentions: “How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.” As was true of The God of Small Things, there is more than a touch of fairy tale in the book’s moral simplicity—or clarity, if you’re feeling charitable. Consider the book’s dedication—“To, The Unconsoled.” Note the cover photograph, a grave, and the setting: The story begins and ends in a graveyard. It tours India’s fault lines, as Roy has, from the brutal suppression of tribal populations to the 2002 pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat. Roy has imagined an inverse of the Garden of Eden—a paradise whose defining feature, rather than innocence, is experience and endurance.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton - whodathunk

Have been thinking about Sun and Moon always, especially today morning, and therefore this book captivated me.

“The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

There is certainly a lot to like about Eleanor's novel. Its structure is fascinatingly clever and reminds me a lot of the way Nabokov divided Ada, or Ardor. Part 1: 360 pgs, 12 chapters Part 2: 160 pgs, 11 chapters Part 3: 104 pgs, 10 chapters; Part 4: 96 pgs, 9 chapters; Part 5: 40 pages,8 chapters; Part 6: 26 pages, 7 chapters; Part 7: 13 pages, 6 chapters; Part 8: 10 pgs,5 chapters Part 9: 6 pgs, 4 chapters; Part 10: 6 pgs,3 chapters Part 11: 4 pages, 2 chapters, Part 12: 4 pages, 1 Chapter. The first chapters are endless with one-line introductions - the last chapters are shorter than their introductions. This gives The Luminaries the shape of a golden spiral. It also acts like a spiral – or, to keep up the celestial theme, a black hole, stripping out information as it goes. Everything fits perfectly, and this perfection entwines with the story which starts out as a confusing mess but ends with all the answers. Another interesting fact is that this story takes its focal point in Walter Moody, but at the same time it's not at all about Walter Moody. It is set in New Zealand among gold diggers; however, very little of the story deals with actual gold digging. With its exotic and varied cast of characters whose lives all affect each other and whose fates are intricately entwined, amounts to anything like the moral and emotional weight one would expect of it. The Luminaries is replete with diggers, businessmen, politicians, Chinese miners and dispensers of opium, ladies of the evening, to use the appropriate Victorian vernacular. Twelve men meet at the Crown Hotel in Hokitika, New Zealand, on 27 January, 1866 (Mercury in Sagittarius). A thirteenth, Walter Moody, an educated man from Edinburgh who has come here to find his fortune in gold, walks in. As it unfolds, the interlocking stories and shifting narrative perspectives of the twelve--now thirteen--men bring forth a mystery that all are trying to solve, including Walter Moody, who has just gotten off the Godspeed ship with secrets of his own that intertwine with the other men's concerns. The plot winds through time, conveying the reader through the perceptions of a dozen characters.The way that tale is told changes throughout the book, moving from a story told by insiders to an outsider, to the narration of a series of connected events, finally ending with its beginning.

The characters were based on star-sign attributes. The story in The Luminaries is seasoned with astrology but not overwhelmed by it. It is beautifully structured around stars and destinies among stars. Twelve of Catton’s characters (the twelve men interrupted by Walter Moody) represent the signs of the zodiac; another seven represent planetary bodies (Moody is Mercury, for instance). As mentioned in a comment in Goodreads:

"Te Rau Tauwhare (a greenstone hunter):Aries the Ram thrusts forward, discarding the past except as a symbol of what has been overcome. Fearsome, single-minded Aries! This book does not fall under the sign of Aries; it is invested in the past, it is enchanted by it. The past is such an important part of the novel that the narrative continues after its climactic resolution with a series of escalating chapters that take the reader back to where it all began. The Luminaries' characters live under the shadow of their own pasts, they judge others by their past actions as well. Aries is well-represented by Te Rau Tauwhare, a Maori greenstone hunter.

Charlie Frost (a banker):Taurus the Bull is a sign of love, in all of its strength and awkwardness, its earthiness and purity. Obstinate, strong-willed Taurus! This book has a strong Taurean influence: it has at its heart a passionate and moving story of star-crossed lovers, determined to persevere, blind to reason - two parts of a whole that yearn to merge. Taurus is represented - poorly - by the aloof banker Charlie Frost.

Benjamin Lowenthal (a newspaperman):Gemini the Twins, sharp and cutting, a sign of the mind, of the air. Impulsive and restless Gemini! This book has a marked Gemini influence in its clever narrative voice, one often sidelined by description and dialogue yet still distinct, full of wit and sly innuendo. Gemini's influence is even stronger when considering the almost dizzying ingenuity of the book's look-at-me structure and its increasingly cheeky chapter introductions. Gemini is represented by Benjamin Lowenthal, a Jewish newspaper editor and a character in need of richer development.

Edgar Clinch (an hotelier):Cancer the Crab moons about in its shell, moody and self-absorbed, yet caring and loyal to the end. Complicated, sensitive Cancer! The Crab has little to do with The Luminaries, except when looking at the novel in general terms. A strong and thick hardcover book, a complicated structure, a soft heart lurking within. Cancer is well-represented by the hotelier Edgar Clinch.

Dick Mannering (a goldfields magnate):Leo the Lion sits back, the very image of self-satisfaction, a magnet to lesser men, a sun that would have the whole universe revolve around it. Confident and surprisingly generous Leo! The heavy-lidded sensuality of the Lion holds court throughout The Luminaries, its beautiful imagery and its rich descriptive prowess openly displayed; well-hung Leo also clearly influenced this book's impressive length. Leo is represented by Dick (lol) Mannering, a goldfields magnate.

Quee Long (a goldsmith): Virgo the Virgin is the sign of this reviewer. It is the most wonderful sign imaginable: critical yet fair, judgmental but only in the most loving of ways, altruistic, well-read, self-sacrificing, practically perfect in every way, the Mary Poppins of the Zodiac. All must bow to the wonder of Virgo! The Virgin is terribly represented by Quee Long, who is about the opposite of any decent Virgo. For shame, Eleanor Catton, you have betrayed the Zodiac with your libelous portrait of a so-called Virgo!

Harald Nilssen (a commission merchant):Libra the Scales is a sign of beauty, and much like Beauty itself, displays both grace and superficiality, charisma and vanity. Lovely, indecisive Libra! Libra's scales are seldom in balance; this sign seeks to make things equal and often fails. And so it is with the author of The Luminaries, a Libra on the cusp of Virgo. Her favorites among the novel's astrological characters are dynamic and richly developed; those less-favored are given mere cameo appearances. But don't look for fairness from a Libra - look for beauty! And there is much beauty within the pages of The Luminaries. Exquisite prose, gorgeous imagery, lovely moments within its lovely love story; the beautiful mind of its author, yearning to be recognized for its brilliance - and rewarded by the 2013 Man Booker Prize. Libra is represented - perfectly - by Harald Nilssen, a commission merchant.

Joseph Pritchard (a chemist): Scorpio is the Scorpion, and the Eagle as well. It soars above the earth and lives in its holes. This strange sign is the Investigator of the Zodiac and is also its greatest conundrum - secretive to its core, yet suspicious of secrets in others; dark and unyielding; often cold yet deeply sexual. Mysterious, obsessive Scorpio! The Luminaries is intimately connected to the Scorpion, in its basic nature as a Mystery Novel and in its refusal to solve certain mysteries, to keep them shrouded in ambiguity. The Eagle dislikes having to explain itself. Scorpio is represented by Joseph Pritchard, a chemist and a perfectly executed character who is left almost entirely off of the page. Perhaps Catton feared the perverse potential lurking within him and so curtailed her exploration of his depths. I also felt the Scorpio influence upon this novel's villain, the dark, manipulative, unknowable Francis Carver.

Thomas Balfour (a shipping agent):Sagittarius the Archer shoots an arrow into the future, his true place; Sagittarius the Centaur gallops quickly, heedless of those too simple and slow to keep his pace. Strong-willed, independent Sagittarius! This sign's influence on The Luminaries is striking: it has no patience for readers of the idiot class. It makes scarce concessions to those longing for explanations or a simple plotline; it will give you the opportunity to come into its world and be surrounded, enveloped... and it will leave you behind if you are unable to keep up. Sagittarius is well-represented by Thomas Balfour, a shipping agent.

Aubert Gascoigne (a justice's clerk):Capricorn the Sea-Goat: "still waters run deep" was surely coined for this sign, one whose stable and inhibited surface appearance belies the complicated ambitions within. Patient, resourceful Capricorn! A courageous introvert, a fastidious intellectual, virile yet chilly, dignified and aloof and rich with hidden depths. The novel The Luminaries was born under the sign of Capricorn. The novel's birth sign is represented - perfectly - by Aubert Gascoigne, a justice's clerk.

Sook Yongsheng (a hatter):Aquarius the Water-bearer abhors restrictions and eschews barriers, seeking the enlightenment beyond, traveling the stars without and within, ever in search of wisdom. Inventive, rebellious Aquarius! A shallow reviewer of the novel would find little influence from the Water-bearer as the book is a carefully constructed puzzle rather than an ingenious invention, a mathematically mapped-out pièce de résistance rather than a spontaneous improvisation. But dig deeper and you shall find the sublime Aquarian ruling an eerie and haunting love story, one full of unexplainable visions and brazen leaps of faith. Aquarius is well-represented by Sook Yongsheng, a Chinese hatter and lover of opium.

Cowell Devlin (a chaplain): Pisces the Fish, Pisces the dreamer, the last sign and the oldest. Pisces yearns for escape, in dreams, in drugs, in art, in the dark damp spaces. Elusive Pisces, the sign of self-undoing! I had a Piscean experience when reading this novel. It was my go-to book for a certain period of time, a little bit nearly every morning and every afternoon, for almost 3 months. I escaped into its depths, it was my sweet sweet drug and I fear that I am suffering from withdrawal. This lengthy review was an attempt to live in it again. Alas, now even this review is over. Pisces is represented - rather poorly - by Cowell Devlin, a chaplain. "

Another set of characters is associated with heavenly bodies within the solar system.
Walter Moody: Mercury
Lydia (Wells) Carver née Greenway: Venus - Crosbie Wells widow and Frank Carvers girl friend
Francis Carver: Mars - Captain of a ship Godspeed- Man at the heart of all these strange occurrence
Alistair Lauderback: Jupiter - Crosbie Wells half brother
George Shepard: Saturn - Lawman
Anna Wetherell: The Sun/The Moon - Prostitute helping Lydia in her new venture - Arrested for trying to kill herself
Emery Staines: The Moon/The Sun - The missing Man who pop us and is sentenced to jail

A bit on the plot:

A couple of weeks earlier to the 12 people meeting, a hermit named Crosbie Wells was found dead in his cottage, and a not inconsiderable fortune soon after. Around the same time, a young woman (Anna Wetherell) was found unconscious from opium (Ah Sook is the dealer) in the road, apparently having tried to commit suicide. Through acquaintance with each other, each of the twelve men discovered that he was somehow connected to these events; so they decided to gather together in this room to discuss what may have happened, and what could be done. We never find out, how the central murder happens, or whether Staines get shot for real, or its a supernatural occurrence, we can piece together our own thoughts, theories and observations. At the end of the day, when all the intrigue, violence, and greediness around gold is over, it's really the love affair between Anna and Emery that emerges as having been central all along. Whodathunk (Who would have thought?) At the end of the day, it all comes back to relationship. - Love will keep us together. But this might be annoying to some and hence not equally loved by all readers; after all the suspense, drama and thrill the expectations would have been different.

The Luminaries – an upside-down, southern hemisphere kind of a place with its own astrological calendar that casts its own kind of influence, its own light. The clue is in the title, after all, and in the confusing frontispiece that the publishers might have made more of, to alert the general reader to the fabulous trick of the book they hold: that this great, intricately crafted doorstopper of a historical novel, with its portentous introduction, astrological tables, character charts and all the rest, in fact weighs nothing at all. Even before we know the "why", the title tell us the "Who"