Thursday, July 29, 2010

Building a Perception Far Ahead of Reality ! think twice ..

Back after a long hiatus to the world of Blogging :-) READ as " Basic laziness to construct long sentences and paragraphs" . Being a marketer I often wonder whether building a perception far ahead of reality is the way to go. There was a time or it was often joked most American companies launch the product as soon as the design spec's are ready on a PowerPoint , let alone developing the product, beta testing etc. For instance Microsoft surely learnt a costly lesion with the disastrous results of the much hyped Windows vista platform. No wonder they were doubly sure and on the basis of the lesson learnt, came up with a much more stable and rock solid platform in Windows 7. On the mobile platform Windows 7 is still slated for late 2010 Commercial launch. They must be testing, testing and testing with the fright apple has given them with iphone platform. While the example chosen above has been more relevant to a product , this more or less holds true when a CEO is building a identity or cultural statement for an organization. For instance if Tata's stand for trustworthy brand , this has been achieved over many decades. For sure JRD meant believed the same with his heart and spent a lot of his energies in ensuring successful execution of the thought to reality amongst the thousands of employees across the conglomerate. There are stories within the Tata group about senior management being sacked for not believing in it and not going all out to execute trust worthiness and it was not just building hype and wishy washing away with flimsy execution.

Coming to the moot point of building perception which leads reality which is often driven or conceptualized by the so called Gurus or visionaries who often get carried away by the blind passion that the unique idea they have is perfect and ideal for the rest of the world or for that matter the company or division or any entity they run. The zeal with which they would want everyone else to see beyond the normal is often driven due to a few unique thoughts they have. While the thoughts per se are revolutionary they sometime fail to understand that execution of the thoughts is equally critical. Execution to the last mile and many a time it requires the masses to believe passionately the very thought you espouse. For the masses to believe with the same passion the unique idea will require perfecting the execution process to the extent it becomes a movement amongst the masses. This at times might take a complete decade. The shorter the time it takes if the great unique idea is thought through to an extent that every step is carefully managed and the original intent is maintained and passionately transmitted from one to another without any loss in the intensity original idea. The idea obviously needs to be real in all ways. "Thinking" , "doing" and " "communicating" all these three dimensions need equal amount of attention by every individual in the organization. Gone or the days of the army culture , that there is one part of the organization which will do higher level thinking another part will just be executers and another part will focus on information dissemination. Every individual / manager will have to spend nearly equal amounts of time for each of the above dimensions. In conclusion Building perception which is ahead of reality is a great idea and should be done but only to the extent it is sustainable and stands by its merit. Do not build a perception which is far ahead of reality but slightly ahead of reality is fine , so that each one of us will do the extra stretch to reach close to it or even achieve the same.

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