When I was in my school days, my dad used to say, “Beta, your basics should be strong.” Back then, it was just a statement for me because I hardly realized the meaning of that sentence. Well, a person (A) earning 1 million dollars a year and having a stressful life Vs a person (B) earning $100,000 a year and enjoying his life to the fullest in the same city. While (B) can still reach the heights of (A) in terms of monetary goals and still enjoy his life; the reverse wouldn’t be true for (A). So, what’s wrong here— the answer lies in programming your inner engineering!
What is ‘inner engineering’?
It is how you learn to program your inner self and respond to external situations. Mostly, professional courses like engineering, MBA, and others, make you job-ready, but they also reprogram your inner self to make you survive in the cut-throat corporate world. To be a successful decision-maker and thought leader, you should be able to see life from a bigger perspective and balance your inner engineering.
- Money shouldn’t rule us. Reverse it.
- Follow the eightfold paths of Buddha.
- Follow the minimalistic living
Once you’re able to slowly engineer your inner self, you will be able to have a deeper understand of actions and the possible outcomes. You’ll eventually get better at decision making and can contain the biggest possible mistakes in decision making which you as a CEO or startup founder who end up making.
The Biggest Mistakes Companies, MNCs, and Startups Make
Wrong decisions result in the biggest mistakes, and we make them, knowingly or unknowingly. Most of the time, we are not able to understand the implications of the decisions we make. So, in the post today, we are going to discuss the aspects and principles that can help us make the right decisions– and most importantly, decisions which are balanced and paint a future that is bright and vibrant.
1. It’s Not About Money. It is about a Better Tomorrow
Don’t you think so?
You can do a market gap analysis, find an opportunity and build a business. Alternatively, you can set up an arbitrage model and make millions of dollars every month or simply create an algorithm and run a brokerage business. You can also make the rich richer and take your percentage cut. Most of the businesses today are doing this, because it is about making money, for most of us.
But how many are thinking of a better tomorrow– The real heroes or that league of guardian angels. Well, they are not sent from the sky but amongst us. Those who think beyond themselves have minimal expectations and appreciate Nature’s abundance can genuinely be the forerunners to make this world a better place. Yes, as a company CEO, a startup founder, a decision-maker, you need to get back to the basics of our understanding of life and survival, our purpose. It all comes down to making this world a better place and protecting our closed ones– your family, your employees, your friends, and everyone at large.
2. The Reality is More Complex.
Two plus two is four; however, the rules of classical physics do not apply at quantum levels. This brings forward one of the fundamental truths of our generation, which is,
“the reality is far more complex and beyond the realm of our understanding.”
The quicker we understand this, the better it is for all of us, because we will eventually put a stop at chasing it. Interestingly, “data” seems to be the tool which we are using to understand the complexities of reality while ‘data’ makes sense only under conditions when there are no external variables.
We, humans, have our ecosystem, and unfortunately, this is so complex that we can’t create future predictions and simulations. The reality is complex and uncertain.
A lot of companies and MNCs try to automate this “human ecosystem” through guided rules and interventions only to realize after decades that these were the biggest mistakes they willingly endorsed. So, the solution to this is??
3. Love People. Use Things. The Opposite Never Works.
One of the fundamental realities which we are yet to understand fully is ‘the power of love.’ It is so powerful that it not only wins but also rules everything around it. Since time immemorial, people sacrificed everything, including their lives for the sake of love and their loved ones. It is one thing that has genuinely remained unchanged and stood the test of time.
Now, go ahead, talk to your HR and reframe all policies keeping in mind that you need to love your employees first and all other things come second. It may sound daunting, but you’ll eventually see wonders happening around you.
4. Failing to Understand Entanglements
Entanglements are for real, they are everywhere, even right inside your bedroom and are inseparable. If you’re divorced for a similar reason, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring it to a personal level. However, it is essential as a decision-maker to understand that whenever there are more than two people, the third person will eventually influence the decision and the relationship between two people at any given frame of time. It is a phenomenon that even exists at the quantum level and is called ‘quantum entanglement’. They do have bigger implications in real life, and the worst outcomes of it are separations.
There can be immense productivity issues within the organization attributing to it, and realities can get altered quick and fast. While containing such entanglements are beyond our scope, we can certainly minimize them by adding more ‘uncertainties’ which can be controlled. So these ‘uncertainties’ act as external agents and come into the picture to better understand such entanglements.
5. Making Wrong Recruits
Okie! It is one of the straightforward mistakes which every company has to live through. Since you’re dealing with ‘people’ here, the reality is far more complex. The interviewer is only able to understand the technical aspects of the recruit during the interviewing process. Understanding the EQ is equally important, along with the IQ and placing the recruits under the right leadership is the foundation for the ongoing growth of the company.
There needs to be a lot of internal assessment and R&D to understand which kind of candidate will be suitable for the company and shall have a long term productive association.
The second essential task is to have a detailed training and learning management system in place to enhance the core competencies of the recruits and also provide emotional and mental training for an overall balance.
Additionally, you should know that even the wrong choices can be altered if everyone is willing to collaborate as a family.
6. Choosing wrong KPIs
It is the 21st century! Time to move beyond the textbooks and delve deeper into real-life KPIs.
- Customer Satisfaction Index
- Employee Family Satisfaction Index
- Inner Engineering Score
- Creativity Index
- Progressive Mindset Index
- Regressive Mindset Index
- Travel Training Index
- Life Goal Completion Index
- Minimal Living Index
There can be so many apart from the Employee satisfaction index, and you can create your own. The idea of all these indices is to identify and understand your employees better and contribute towards a thrilling life index.
- Train eyes and it can find beauty and aesthetics.
- Train mind and it can pour in logic, ideas, and creativity.
- Train soul and it can bring in harmony and balance.
- Train body and it can show you the power of will.
Along with performance bonuses, give an additional ten days of travel benefit to your employees who seek to explore lesser-known places or go for a retreat.
These are just a few of the KPIs related to employees. Your business can have more than dozens of KPIs, and each of them is crucial because the shadow of the same object changes when you change the angle.
7. Marketing too Much?
While ‘marketing’ is often the way to go for scaling your business- customer acquisition and more… Too much of it is not always a good idea. There are marketing gurus who will set up KPIs, create custom goal settings, manage funnels, and generate robust ROI for you. However, make sure you take into account the following factors as well.
- Drop-off rates
- Customer satisfaction
- Active users
- Training and community activities
Siphon some of your marketing budgets and invest in community building activities where you can interact with like-minded customers. Automate every other aspect of your customer interaction but make sure to have the human touch ingrained. Also, here comes a more abysmal choice of “quality” vs “quantity”. Are you insurance or a movie streaming company like Netflix, or are you a company with a specialized solution targeted at specific audiences?
Bring in the balance. Invest in marketing, but at the same time invest in your customers.
A good practice is to create customer loyalty points and send a gift to your top 100 customers (or whatever number you’ve in mind). Hire a chocolate chef, engage your employees, prepare nice handmade chocolates for everyone (your employees and your first 100 customers). Pack them nicely with a hand note and flowers (with fragrance) and ship them off.
- The handmade chocolates carry the ‘human touch’.
- Flowers are inexpensive yet the best gifts (sourced from Nature)
- Spray a little fragrance to stimulate those sensory nerves
When you are marketing, put the effort in creating shareable stories, cherishing moments, and don’t just stick to numbers and beautifying your lead generation and sales funnels.
8. Let Everyone Make Invaluable Memories
When you think about higher retention among your customers or employees, everything comes down to this fundamental principle, “let your people have invaluable experiences and memories while they are with you.” I cannot stress enough about the importance of this single thought. This can blend well with your product design ideas, people management ideas, training ideas, in fact, everywhere you can think. Set up an internal team that is tasked to make this work, but do not overdo.
An excellent way to do this is first to understand what your employees care most in their regular lives or principles that they follow. Do stand by them in times when they need it the most.
Make them do something that they have never done in the past, or it can get as simple as bringing in a dance instructor and practice dancing session on Friday evenings.
Sometimes it can also be as simple as sudden storytelling activity with something to munch.
Or it can be the modified version of “parents-teacher meeting” where you and your HR team can meet the parents of your employees, maybe in 1-1 or group, talk and go out for a group lunch.
When people spend more than 10 hours a day and that too every day, they deserve it to be remembered as something more than just an ‘office’.
9. External Influences? Cut them Short.
Ok! There can be external influences on any business. The role of the decision-maker is to minimize these outside influences and protect your employees, ethics, and principles. There are individual causes that set us apart, but we all stand strong for the common principles we vowed together. As you grow, as you make more collaborations, as more business units open, these ethics and regulations can become secondary for you.
Your priorities can change to driving more profits, better growth, etc. But not everyone’s…
However, that may not be the case with your early employees, and there may be a lot of people who value these principles more than the company’s balance sheet. Again, tough choices, but you should always get your basics right.
The biggest business mistakes you make are mostly based on internal choices. If you have a strong business and real life acumen, you should be able to make decisions which are appropriate by following these psychological understanding about life. Check back next Sunday at 5 pm for another interesting post!