MisManagement 101 ..

Let me share with you a folktale back from the days of my childhood summers ...

A villager decides to go do 'Tapasya' in mountains .. and spends years and years of time to pray to his favorite God. God gets very pleased after many years of the meditation and appears before the villager.

God speaks to the villager

I am extremely pleased with your devotion in these modern times. Ask whatever you want and I shall grant you ONE wish!

The villager bows venerably before the God and speaks

Sir ! "please grow hair on the ears of my mother-in-law!!"

God gets surprised but he is bound to grant the wish of his devotee

Ok! I have granted your wish. But I am curious to know why you have spent so many years of hard tapasya to ask for such a strange wish ?!?

The villager speaks...

Sir! when I was very young, I heard that the son-in-law gets extremely lucky if his mother-in-law has hair on the ear lobes. That is the reason why I have asked for that wish ..

God laughs out very loud and makes the following comment before disappearing ..

If all you wanted is to be extremely lucky .. you should have just asked for that !!

Moral of the story ...

Before you go ahead and ask for the solution .. take few minutes to actually think and analyze what is the problem you are going to solve with the solution

For many leaders who are trying to make impactful changes to better their organizations, it is many times not uncommon to get prescriptive of the solution and most of the subordinates tend to tow the line and rush to implement the prescription. At the end of the retrospection, if you don't see the desired outcome .. you have no one to blame but to look in the mirror.

 In your rush to get things done, if you jump the gun and start telling "How you want things done" as opposed to "What you want to be done", you will make your organization "procedure" oriented rather than "process" oriented.