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November 2009 
Sustained High Performance by Design
JM
On August 25th 2008, I was witness to a different kind of Olympic event. Around 300 very young people (average age, 25) were celebrating their outstanding achievements and performance at work in the Trinity hall of Taj Residency, Bangalore where I heard the following dialogue
"We are meeting here a day after the Olympics, an Olympics where China made its century and we got away with the ‘holy trinity'. It is appropriate that we meet in the trinity hall and discuss our performance be it in Olympics or in our work. We need to celebrate performance even if they are not grand victories and we need to celebrate such winnings in the context of the community that made it possible. I congratulate all of you and those who have shown such a brilliant planning of the event that we could discuss these issues in the most appropriate context. I thank you for making it possible for me to be part of this celebration of community and performance. It is also the most appropriate time for us to discuss and envision as a community of practice and the heights of performance that we would scale in the coming years
The average age of billionaires is 61. The Face book CEO, Mark Zukerman is the youngest of the lot at 23. Two out of every three of the billionaires are self made like the welfare mom JKR who made it to the list at 42. So it is not always an inheritance of wealth that that takes us to the height but how we leverage our inheritance that nature and history has given us that takes us to the history book. Our own Anil Ambani is the one with the fastest rate of growth. More of them from China and India are making it to the history book. The combined worth of around 1100 billionaires is around 3 trillion dollars.
Abhinav Bhindra, 25, the lone gold medalist from 1 billion Indians has been drilling holes on paper for 12 years. He was 7 when he proved himself to be a sharp shooter. From taking the position to be a shooter to reaching the summit of achievement spans a journey of 18 years, many a set back and smaller wins in between. For Michel Phelps, focused effort started at 13 and the crowning event happened at 23. Mastering of the process takes ten years or even more. It is most often a lonely journey. What would be more interesting to watch will be how these people continue to perform and rewrite the story of human potential? Sergei Bubka continues to perform off the field.
Mapping the human potential would require a closer study of the exceptions, not just in athletics, but from as many perspectives as possible at different levels, individuals, institutions, communities, global and at the level of the species.
We will remember the events and forget the process. We have a built in bias to our birthdays, floods, festivals and feasts.
How did China top the 2008 Olympics? India too has a comparably large population. China won by design, India won by default. It is ironic that the same is true of performance in other areas too. If India does not perform, the world will not because one in every six is an Indian and one out of every three of the poor in the world also is an Indian. While individual performance may happen in isolation, performing as a community involves complexity of a much higher order. Some communities have a history of continual improvement while others do not fare as well.
India offers complexity of the highest order which makes it all the more interesting to students of performance/ achievements. No other country has the same kind of complexity of color, religions, languages and dialects. For almost two thousand years it has remained in a slumber, very often basking in the glory of a far too distant past.
Personal growth to performance as a single community is a continuum and at some stage in the process, the critical mass and velocity is achieved for the collective transformation
A small minority takes position as individuals. They decide early in life as to their purpose of being here. The direction of their journey is clear to them and they hang on tenaciously. Once they achieve that some of them redefine their goals to the next phase in the journey. Some others take a position much later during the course of the journey. Many do not take a position at all. They leave it to the astrologer, fate, destiny or default.
As a nation India prefers the astrologer to the management consultant.
Global standards apply to the metrics of performance as in the Olympics though the same is realized within the local context. The gardener needs to know the soil. Gardening skills from Silicon Valley would need to be localized for better results in Bangalore. Unless it performs better than Silicon Valley, it does not get into the metrics. Once you get in to the record books, there is the problem of continuing to outperform the competition. We have outlined the problem of sustained high performance. The two B- schools that I attended and the work that I was involved with kept me reminded of the Indian and the developmental complexity, that one cannot imitate and compete with the competition since a copy can never be better than the original. Each one is in a unique situation or context and each one has to find choose his/her road. That applies to community too, regardless of the scale, be it organizations or nations. But some universals hold good which could accelerate the process. The context is different to each one of us. We are all trying to build a Cathedral or Taj Mahal. The story is all too familiar and with every retelling it could take in new perspectives. In the latest version, the supervisor on the spot is beheaded by the emperor. The logic- had the supervisor been effective in his role emperor would have heard the same answer from all the masons. (More on leadership in the Indian context http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5992.html) The challenge of creating community necessitates taking a common position, a coming together based on a shared vision. How do you create such a vision? Do we have something, a non-controversial reference point around which communities can emerge?
We have very sophisticated systems to navigate the planet and beyond. Navigating through life is a more complex process where each one of us is left with multiple tools. For some it may be the astrologer or their particular brand of belief system. The multiplicity of the maps is one of the blocks to a common journey. I remember a starlit night, by the bank of the river. Looking at the sky my teacher asked me "What is the meaning of all this"? I had no answer but there was a wish at the time that someday I would find it out. It took 25 years to resolve the issue of making sense of the world, to make a map. http://firstdiscipline.gaia.com/blog/2008/7/the_first_discipline_framework
The Chinese seafarers had better maps than Columbus. A good one will not take you where you never wanted to go and need not be revised too often. The FDF is a map to reduce the complexity of the developmental process across multiple levels and contexts. A map has to hold good at the local as well as global levels, something similar to the periodic table. The FDF has been in use for 17 years now to accelerate the learning process associated with personal growth and enhancing community.
The 5 Ps of making sense of the world
Purpose, Positioning, Potential, Performance and Process (paying attention to improvements)
We are born like bullets going out of the gun. Who fired the shot? We did not unless you are a mystic who would say that you chose your time, parents and place of your birth
We have inherited a body, mind and spirit from our parents. It is a product of a process as old and as young as the universe. How does one convert this inheritance - make it our own, own it? This is where the 5 Ps come in.
Can a 100 year old regenerate his body? Prior to regenerating the body one should regenerate the spirit, the meaning
The spirit is about the purpose. Why are we here? Is it just because we were born - by default? Or is there a design? One should be able to recognize the design, the purpose
The GOI has a department of Ayush, to my knowledge, the only one of its kind in the world. We had a science of life - Ayurveda - which we have inherited from our past, the department which is dealing with life. The purpose is to live; defeat death that is the science of Ayurveda. The philosophy is in stark contrast to the mainstream understanding of health and healing wherein to fall sick is an exception. The mainstream belief is that to fall ill is the order which is self-fulfilling
Once we have a purpose for which we are ready to die, take a position, we will not die unless the purpose is achieved. This is what it means to take a position. So have an impossible dream and take the position that this is the purpose of my being here if we want to outperform the competition, live longer, defeat death, gain market share, whatever
What do we learn from people with exceptional longevity, centenarians? Why do they go on? Many of them are healthier than the 20 + some things I mostly work with. They seldom go to the doctor and still have that sparkle in their eyes.
When the purpose is absent the potential of the body is not challenged and unless we challenge, stretch, we do not create the conditions for the potential to be expressed - Michael Phelps, Bubka, Isinbayeva, Bhindra - as individuals
Next step is to challenge these limits as a community of practice and pay attention to process, the improvements that happen and the metrics. Improvements follow from new learning. LLL. the self, individual or community, is the learner hence the first discipline.
The 5 Ps are in place. There are others http://firstdiscipline.gaia.com/blog/2008/6/path
Reflection, 2008-09-03
There has been a steady increase in views. Thanks for coming back again and again which is some measure of community that is emerging.
Here is the statistics.
Month | Views | Increase | No of blogs/ Average views/Max views |
June | 1400 | 28 40 100 | |
July | 2548 | 1148 | 35 72 183 |
August | 3766 | 1222 | 39 96 231 |
All the blogs are in process, evolving in tune with your feedback and mails.
Thank you
JM
Access: Public
Another lucid entry. Enhancing community poerformance- I gained some little insight into aspects while working with performing arts students on production projects. There were times when the whole group would somehow energise itself, usually through two or three individuals taking a lead by modelling excellence and committment and drawing everyone else along with them. At other times it didn't happen and was just hard work.
I love this- “India offers complexity of the highest order”. I can almost imagine.
Thank You. Chris
JM
Quite inspiring… :)