How to be succesful in life ?

 When one sees this title, I am sure lot of us will be feeling, this is just another article to snatch away your time. It has no use and is just a writeup. I also used to think so about these feel good books, articles etc, but then when I saw this Jim Rohn piece, it somewhere within me started an urge to want to read this and understand what are the essential ingredients that make some people succeed in life.

Not everyone has a success story to tell, not every one is happy with the turn of events in their life. It takes a concerted effort to realise that one has a lot more to learn from life,. No one is complete in himself or herself and has a lot more to learn from  the environment, the people and the events around one self. 

I am putting around the ten points highlighted by Jim Rohn on how to be successful in life, hope you find some interesting points in it for yourself.

1. Sense of purpose

2. Self-confidence

3. Enthusiasm

4. Expertise

5. Preparation

6. Self-reliance

7. Self-Image

8. Character

9. Self-discipline

10. Extraordinary performance

I found these ten points extremely relevant, practical, and pointed. that I could not resist myself from writing on it.  The other great thing I have found from the points Jim Rohn presented, were the order in which they were laid out. It is exactly in the same order that we need to highlight our strengths and capabilities

If I were to add a couple of points to add to these it will be 

11. Keeping good health leading to self-confidence

12. Developing a caring attitude.

13. Consider Age as an asset

Keeping good health si basic to all our growth in life. If we have some health issues that pull back during vital time periods of our life because of disabilities or bad health, the negative vibes it send in our bodies is very damaging. How we keep up the will to succeed and perform in life, in spite of the bad health will take us forward in life.

Most of us also consider age to be a major negative factor that pulls back our efforts. If we look at the Nobel Prize winners, we find the average age of Nobel prize winners is sixty two years. It means half of the Nobel laureates were below the age of sixty two when they won the prize and half were above sixty two when they won it.  So if you are nearing sixty, you are nearing the age of wisdom and knowledge in your life, the time when you can contribute to society from your vast and richj experience, be in it your subject area or otherwise, you will definitely have a lot to share with your colleagues and juniors in life.

Click here to listen to the youtube video from Jim Rohn.

George...

Organisational Strategies to control wastes ..

Consumerism is bound to generate waste. Humans world over have generated 1.2 billion tonnes of solid waste in 2016 which is bound to increase to 2.5 billion tonnes by 2025. (click here).

Companies are going all out in ensuring they give the customers the best both in terms of product durability and product quality. These organisations are trying their level best to reduce the environmental wastes as a result of the use of their products. A product which fails early or reaches its end of life early is a burden to the environment as it has to be disposed earlier than other competing products, damaging and polluting the environment at a faster rate than other competing products.

Increased customer awareness and sensibility discourages customers from purchasing products that have a short life or an early end of life.

We find companies taking lot of steps to control wastes, by planning to control waste generation at the different stages of

1. design and testing, 
2. supply chain and delivery, 
3. useful life
   
4. value or usage life extension
5. end of life disposal 
   

The steps taken by the organisations in this stage are detailed below.

• designing the products themselves with less wasteful components and ready for recycling. A well designed product besides meeting the performance requirements of the applications, does also ensure longer life of product and better recyclability in case of recycled products. Even if the end products have to be disposed, its impact on the environment has to be minimal.
  
• optimising supply chain costs in the delivery / distribution of the product. 
• getting locally available raw materials for production
• finding manufacturing process design that is minimally exploitative of the environment, with lower carbon footprint and better recyclability
  
• better end of life disposability of products with minimal environmental impact
  
• outlining detailed steps for careful and extended use of the product by better documentation and web related information dissemination, arranging call centres to clear operational doubts 
• steps detailing on how the product can be reused and recycled for extended use
  
• arranging collection stations in city suburbs, having arrangements with waste collection centres and government organisations to lift the waste for careful processing

Though the actions are encouraging, the success of these actions are not great. Something is amiss. As organisations have come to realise, placing the onus of waste control and disposal entirely on the customer is not the correct strategy for organisations to adopt.

While continuing research on how to control waste and improve waste handling and processing, the author happened to read an HBR article titled, Companies are working with consumers to reduce waste, by Esposito, Tse and Soufani, HBR, June '16, (click here), where the authors stress that it is mainly customer support and customer engagement that finally marks the success of any waste management process.

These customers can be individual customer to major organisations who consume raw materials to product finished goods.

• Finding the right partners
• Giving incentives
• Start  trial program with freedom to change
• build a culture of collective value with customers
  

The HBR research and vast experience of the authors tells us that it is the customers who  are the most important part  of the chain and hence the customer should be the focus in trying to identify the source of waste and the disposal.

What is not wanted or desired by the customer should be taken out of the system as early as possible, giving only what the customer wants in the right quantity.

Andrew Winston in this August 2011 HBR article Excess Inventory wastes Carbon and Energy, not just money (click here) mentions of an interesting statistic from Association of Supply Chain Management Professionals that there is almost $8 trillion worth of inventory held in different parts of the supply chain for different products world over, of which almost $2 trillion is just waiting as inventory in the United States alone. Managing inventory thus is a victory both financially and in terms of sustainability.

George ..

Lindbergh and his 1927 historic trans-Atlantic flight ..

The *Spirit of St. Louis* is the custom-built, single-engine, single-seat, high-wing monoplane that was flown by Charles Lindbergh on May 20–21, 1927, on the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight from Long Island, New York, to Paris, France, for which Lindbergh won the $25,000 Orteig Prize. At a max speed of 214 km/hr, Lindbergh flew non-stop for 33 hrs before landing in Paris. 

The present day $200 billion airline industry owes a lot to this single courageous flight by Lindbergh across the Atlantic ocean all alone ..

How can we make better and effective decisions ?

More often than not in our daily lives we move from one decision to the next and we have to make at least one to two very important decisions at least on a weekly basis. Do we take these decisions with full knowledge or do we allow our biases to colour our decisions ? Do we care whether our decisions affect others negatively and if so do we reconsider such decisions ? A good decision should least negatively affect others. Herbert Simon and Henry Mintzberg are some of the classical theorists who have studied this field in depth.

The picture on the right gives the famous seven steps involved in making a high quality decision. Credit to umass.edu for the pic. 

The seven major steps involved in any major and effective decision making are given below.

• Identify the decision
• Gather information
• Identify alternatives
• Weight the evidence
• Choose among alternatives
• Take action and
• Review the decision.
  

While going through a recent HBR document of April '21 (click here) on the myths that mar effective decision making by Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, I came across very similar thinking. Cheryll in the article mentions of the 1 myths that block effective decision making in our lives. 

The most important among them I found were three in number, 

• the feeling that one is very busy and do not have much time
• one knows enough to help take a good decision and 
• one needs to take the decision alone and not to disturb other stakeholders.

I found that these three biases that mar my decision making at all times is very often wrong. Every decision can wait for some more time before one  takes a final decision. Most of the time we have to take decisions that are based on partial information, we rarely get full info. Our experience and spatial intelligence to understand the situation with its emotions more often help us to take a good decision.

The author of the HBR article also mentions of taking some calculated pauses before any major decision to recollect the importance of it. Called Cheetah Pauses, these small time breakss help us to recollect the situation once again, evaluate the environment and data necessary to take the decision. The small time break puts things in perspective and gives one the confidence to take a good decision. 

Bounded Rationality compels us to take decisions when we are in complex circumstances, hard pressed for time with incomplete information . Refer to the HBR artcile , A brief history of decision making, by Buchanan and Andrew O'Connel, Jan 06 (click here).

It is also a good point to crosscheck at the decision making point how the decision is going to affect oneself in the long term and whether it gels with his or her long term plans.  

Eric Colson in HBR June '19 article, What AI driven decision-making looks like, (click here) brings in Artificial Intelligence that can aid humans to help make right decisions. As different from models that were based completely on human ingenuity to models that used Big Data to analyse data to a summarised form to help make decision making and finally to the modern day situation where Artificial Intelligence analyses Big Data to help make total machine based decisions without human intervention. If human intervention is needed, decision making models are available that subject the AI information output to human analysis to arrive at the final decision.

George..

How Pfizer got the vaccine out in 10 months ....

This article highlights the challenges faced by one of the Covid 19 vaccine developers of the world Pfizer. We know that Pfizer, the New York based global pharma MNC giant employing 79,000 people across 125  countries has been successful in coming up with a vaccine against the Covid 19 virus. Pfizer had revenues in 2020 of $42 billion. 

The Covid 19 vaccine BNT162b2 developed by Pfizer with German BioNTech has shown efficacy of 91.3% measured from six days to 3 months after the second dose. (click here) This article outlines some of the challenges faced by vaccine developers, and more so, when time is scarce and the mortality is increasing daily.

We know vaccines  take anywhere up to 8-10 years to develop. How did Pfizer manage this in about 10 months without much of complications, delays or bureaucratic interference ? How did they manage the testing phases trials 1, 2, 3 and 4 effortlessly and successfully ? The Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla happened to write in HBR of May 2021 (click here) in very clear and simple language how he managed to get the vaccine development done in a short span of about 8 months, when all the odds were against it. He stresses on the patient first mentality.

Leadership mattered very much. Pfizer working alone being successful was a distant reality. Pfizer had the concerns of mankind in mind, in this case, more than any immediate returns or patents. This prompted Pfizer to pump in almost $3 billion for this project. Since it was hard pressed for time and talent doing it alone, it joined hands with BioNTech of Germany, who had the expertise of doing synthetic vaccines using messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.

A vaccine is just weakened forms of the virus (or whatever pathogen it is dealing). In this case the vaccines are prepared synthetically by mRNA technology using the pathogen's genetic code, and it helps speed up the process. No vaccine developed through the mRNA technology had ever been approved till then in the world. The efforts that started around March '20, found BioNTech joining by April. 

Normally the trials would first start with animals and then four sets of human trials on limited than large samples. The tests are also done on placebos to check the efficacy of the virus. It is very difficult to get the required permissions and sanctions from the regulatory agencies, more so with US Federal Drugs Administration. Being an emergency and the okay from US FDA and German regulatory authorities coming fast, the tests on large animals and phase 1 on about 20-100 human samples were done simultaneously. The main objective of this vaccine development was to come up with a new vaccine after finishing the mandated trials in as short a time as possible.

Similarly Pfizer request to the authorities to combine third stage trials (on hundreds of human samples usually spread over 1-3 years) and stage 4 trials (usually done on thousands of human samples over 1-4 years) was accepted by the above authorities and this gave added impetus to Pfizer to race towards completion of the vaccine. It was gradually discovered that to be effective against the virus, the treatment would require two doses of the vaccine spaced three weeks apart.

By end July '20 Pfizer was confident of two vaccine formulations that was ready to go to stage 3 and stage 4. Simultaneously the manufacturing supply chain for the vaccine production in US and Germany proceeded with great haste developing cold supply chains and storage boxes with remotely monitored temperature gauge and GPS monitors. In the meantime Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla (and author of the HBR paper) acting with the CEO of Johnson and Johnson, managed to interact with other pharma CEOs in the race to develop the Covid vaccine to get global acceptance to adhere to rigorous scientific processes and safety standards to develop the vaccine. Everyone agreed that speed was critical but not at the expense of scientific rigour.

By September the manufacturing team was ready with the production line for vaccines. By November as the phase 3 and phase 4 trials were proceeding, only 94 of the 43,500 people who were administered the doses had fallen sick (<0.2%). These 94 people were also from the placebo group, who were administered a placebo instead of the Covid vaccine. 

With the efficacy of the vaccine established, by December 8, 2020, UK started using the vaccine on its citizens and by Dec 14, 2020 US too after approval from FDA. In 2021, Pfizer is planning to produce 2 billion does of the vaccine. In the history of humanity it is for the first time than an anti viral vaccine, instead of the usual development time span of 8-10 years, is getting developed in a span of eight months. Pfizer took a calculated risk of setting up the production lines for its vaccine even months before it was fully accepted by the regulatory authorities. If the tests were not satisfactory, the production facilities would have to be discarded, resulting in great losses for Pfizer. But nothing like that happened.

The lessons learned by Pfizer from this accelerated vaccine development with global collaboration has been multiple.

• Team effort between Pfizer, BioNTech and their supply chain partners
  
• Purpose first, mission was important, not profits. By keeping the societal good as the priority, the objective was very clear and focused.
  
• Moon shot challenges with the right purpose are always galvanising and more often than not, tend to hit it big, always keep aims high ..
  
• encourage out of the box thinking for the team members, do something different from what people have been doing over the years
• Isolating the scientists from financial concerns and excessive bureaucracy to help them to concentrate on the work and develop the vaccine at an accelerated pace
  
• embrace cooperation at the beginning itself. Though the contracts and deals were finalised only in Dec '20, confidential info between Pfizer and BioNTech was shared as early as March '20.
  

As of Feb March '21, seven vaccines have been rolled out across the world.(click here)  Each of the company would also have a similar story to tell the world of their initial vaccine development challenges and how they overcame it. 

Though in the Indian scenario, the Indian companies can produce up to 160 million (16 crore) doses a month, the restrictions on export of certain vaccine components by US companies is stalling the production and this is affecting the deaths in India.  (click here). It will also pass and we will meet our targets soon.

George..

The invaluable experience in Goan open iron ore mines ..

Barges with iron ore moving on the Mandovi to Vasco

I come from the South Indian state of Kerala and finished my engineering education at a great old competent Govt engineering college at Trivandrum in Kerala in 1986. 

Even though my first job was with the Kochi Port Trust, which offered lot of rich experiences and knowledge to begin with, which became very handy in my logistics and supply chain classes, the real break came when I moved to Arkonam in Tamil Nadu,  joining MRF tyres in 1987 Jan. 

Destiny brought me to Goa MRF plant, and to Goa government engineering college for my PG studies and finally to the Goan iron ore mines. Most of us feel, working in the mines is not a great job, just a blue collar job. Most of the people want to work in white collar jobs, IT, consulting etc that does not get your hands dirty.

After moving from MRF tyres Goa, after doing my PG course, I worked in Velingkar iron ore mines in Ponda Tisk, Goa for almost six months. I am thankful to my senior colleague and Goa Engineering college ME alumnus CS Dhaveji, for giving me the opportunity to work in the iron ore mines of Velingkar. 

Iron ore mines of a large MNC in Goa

Mines duties are very tough. One has to use our brain and brawn daily. During rains, the mines are shut down. The task of ensuring high mining efficiency, high truck loading, ensuring proper availability of mining equipment and transportation trucks, proper maintenance crew, proper loading and transportation management in the mines, availability of fuel, refreshments and lunch to field personnel, these are all quite challenging to the field personnel. 

When I worked in the mines, during summer from Jan to June '89, though it was a stop gap arrangement for me before joining Goa Govt Engg college as a lecturer,  the experience was rich.  Got to know in real time many of the aspects of mining, environmental clearances needed and the maintenance problems in heavy earth moving machinery. 

Now when I engage classes in Alliance University Bangalore, thirty years later, on Environmental sustainability and challenges brought about by mining around the world, I can relate directly with the issue and how it affects adversely the community.  If not great comments, I can give learned weighed opinions to the students in the class.

When I take these aspects in the strategy cases, I can explain in real time the challenges and give real time examples that make the class all the more interesting.

Were it not for all these experiences and challenges, I would only have been half as effective in the class. I can imagine how difficult it is for faculty members without industry exposure to engage classes to prepare students for a rich professional life. 

Now I realise all the eight jobs I have been through in my career so far, have helped me become an experienced and factually rich individual with lot of material for conveying to the young generation. 

         Everything happens in our life for a purpose

George. (pic courtesy Economic Times (mines pic) and Businessline (barge pic)

Crisis Management in critical situations ...

 At some point in life we come across some crisis and on a daily basis we come across smaller crises. But take the case of an airline pilot, the amount of pressure he has to endure in the event of an accident is unimaginable. Such people in charge of critical equipments need special training.

The Indian billionnaire Yusuf Ali this morning while flying across Kochi, Kerala, had to do an  emergency landing at swampy land near Panangad in Kochi. Yusuf Ali and his wife were the only passengers besides the pilot. When the Augusta Westland A109 helicopter developed problems atop a populated part of Kochi, the timely intervention and application of mind by the pilot helped it to land which saved the life of Yusuf Ali and his wife. Pic courtesy newsminute.com. Inset Yusuf Ali.

I was reading through a Harvard Business Review article on what constitutes effective crisis management actions. Referring to the article by Hagen, Lei and Shahal, HBR Dec 2019, titled "What aircraft crews know about managing high pressure situations (click here), presence of mind and good communication skills are the most necessary. 

What the crew does in the first 20 seconds following a crisis developing  situation is of utmost importance in deciding the fate of the passengers, crew and the plane. In the case of large planes with hundreds of passengers and twenty to thirty crew members along with the large quantity of fuel onboard, this time is even more critical last it develops into a grave situation. 

The above article has done a good study of such crisis situations and ,mentions that communication between the crew members is of vital importance. In the case of this morning Yusuf Ali's small plane it is not clear whether there was a co-pilot to assist and with whom the pilot could have communicated to get some feedback and info on what to do during the golden 20 second interval. Even if alone, he has done an excellent job.

In military situations, the crisis is still more critical. It is to help pilots take decisions peacefully with a calm mind that airforce pilots even during peaceful times are deployed on reconaissnce missions and practice flights. 

The communication of the captain asking his deputy or co-pilot his opinion and feedback, more often than not helps the captain take a very balanced decision than a quick and less thought out decision. The open communication between the pilot and the co-pilot will give confidence to the other crew members too to give their feedback to the pilot to help steer clear the crisis.

Even in business and our daily lives, whenever a crisis erupts, the best strategy is to take advice and support from colleagues. After weighing the feedback, the decision has to be taken which in most likelihood will be correct than when deciding alone. Open communication with people at all hierarchies at all times is an important trait we should develop in good times and bad.

George.