Music and Management

Hi

I am on the Board of Trustees of an organization called Brhaddhvani - www.brhaddhvani.org and www.universeofsound.org. We are working on a number of music education projects but the one I want to talk about here is the work we plan to launch in the area of music education.

I have been involved in Corporate Training now for over 15 years and I realize that Coprorates can learn a lot from Arts in general and music in particular. Today there is an urgent need for fostering creativity and innovation in Indian Corporates and the global success and recognition that Indian Classical Music has achieved, will offer a number of lessons on what it takes to combine tradition with modernity and make it globally relevant.

Here are a few thoughts:

1. An interest in Music nurtures emotional intelligence

2. Emotional intelligence builds leadership

3. Leadership leads to unleashing human capital

Music is one of the nine multiple intelligences that builds EQ.

Specifically Brhaddhvani will offer:

1. Music appreciation programmes

2. Music education using its unique COMET methodology that accelerates music education

3. Voice culture

4. Instill a sense of pitch and rhythm into every person

5. Apply creative concepts to work situations

6. Harmonize work-life balance

7. Through the work force, influence parents to get their children started early on music appreciation and education

Each one of us is blessed with musical intelligence - the only question is finding and giving expression to it - our lives will be the better for it....the world will be a better place!

The challenge of leading GenY!

"The young mistake intelligence for experience and the old mistake experience for intelligence" is a quote I read somewhere and I was reminded of this when I was invited to be a judge for a "Best Practices" presentation at a leading BPO.

As I sat through presentation after presentation by 26-28 year olds I was truly amazed by the depth and strategic thinking capabilities of today's youngsters!Here was a bunch of vibrant youngsters redefining their businesses and telling their bosses what to do to increase productivity, increase revenues, cut costs, tackle attrition, improve employee morale, the whole 9 yards of the kind of consulting that the Mercers and the McKenzies of the world carry out for a hefty fee - and these youngsters were churning out brilliant ideas all on their own!

To me again I was reminded of one of the biggest lessons in leading GenY - how to get out of their way! As senior leaders, our job really is to ask all the right questions, set the direction, empower the youngsters, ask for their ideas and get out of their way! It takes a lot of courage and guts to accept the fact that the young today have better ideas and a lot more energy making it difficult for us to keep pace with them.

Although I went to "judge", I was humbled because I came away having learnt so much from these young minds. I came away with a lot of conviction about the future leadership of India - and only wished that I could see more organizations unleash the potential of the young like I saw in this organization. I salute the leadership of this organization!

Seat-potatoes!

My friend in the U.S. asked me to come out for a drive with him as he had to run a few errands - and at the end of the drive, I wasn't surprised at why the U.S. tops the obesity charts. Right through the trip, the only parts of his body that moved were his hands to steer the car and one foot on the pedal. (There's no work for the other foot because all cars there are automatic!) Oh yes! He signed a few charge slips!

Let me describe my ride. Our first stop was the pharmacy (not surprised) and he pulls into a drive-in pharmacy where the window opened up and the pharmacist took the prescription and credit card from my friend. In a jiffy, the package and the charge slip came out of the window and off we went to the next spot.

This time, it was to fill gas! We pull up and an enthusiastic gas attendant fills the tank, cleans the windows and swipes the card while both of us are sitting in the car!

It was time for some coffee and we pull up at a drive-in McDonalds - car window comes down, order placed, take away cups collected, little Toyota detailed slots in the car hold the coffee while we continue to drive!

Our next stop was the bank. I wasn't surprised at the drive-in ATM but what surprised me was the fact that this was a full service ATM where you could do any type of bank transaction while sitting in the car.

Our last stop was to pick up the kids from school. As he pulled up at the school, I was almost expecting to drive up to a chute where the kids would slide right into the car - but thankfully, NO! It was good to see, for the first time, my friend get off the car and use his limbs and physically pick up his children.

There is still some hope!

Training vs Facilitation

I just completed delivering a workshop on Training vs Facilitation and I am always amazed by this exploration. However, because of my bias (which itself goes against the grain of facilitation!) a few of my participants mentioned that I was coming down hard on Trainers! And making all Trainers look bad! I realized they were right - because there are contexts where Training is more relevant than facilitation. Like technical training, product training, etc.

However I continue to think that even in these programmes, there is still a lot of room for facilitation - sometime ago I redesigned an entire Six Sigma programme containing 650 powerpoint slides into under 100 slides and mostly facilitated and the results were amazing!

Would love to hear from you what your views are!

Training vs Facilitation or "Facili-training"??

Process versus purpose

Hello everyone,

Here I go as a blogger.....hope to share all that is going on in my mind about things related to leadership, management and facilitation...stuff that I am involved in day in day out....about all that is nice and not so nice that I come across in my work as a facilitator....

This month in my sessions we've been speaking a lot about how too many of us focus on process before even identifying the purpose...so I thought I would dedicate this to an unsung hero I spotted on a narrow Bangalore road (actually all of them are!) who I think understands purpose better than many of us in the corporate world who are busy pushing the process...a self styled traffic cop who takes it upon himself to navigate traffic during the peak hours and a few kind souls give him some money while most go past benefitting from his STOP and GO but never stopping to acknowledge his work let alone rewarding him with some money... just check out the 2 contrasting pics above...