The celebration of another birthday on the wrong side of fifty is cause for introspection and re-engineering of one’s world view.
I have been a diabetic for more than twenty years and have found that treatment of a chronic illness must take a different course from the management of short illnesses. There is usually no light at the end of the tunnel, and as the saying goes, if there is – it is the light of an oncoming train! Pleasure is taken a day at a time and payment is due sooner or later. One learns to live with the illness and all the constraints it imposes on food habits and the delay of instant gratification. Managing chronic disease is a process of first undergoing the classical stages – neglect, denial, anger, hope and then finally, blessed acceptance and the peace that it brings.
At a unlimited food buffet, one learns to pace oneself while eating. As a good friend remarked, the difference between a buffet and a dinner is the difference between a marathon and a sprint. The initial laps are slow, almost languorous, and the finish is tiring but exhilarating. Eating at buffets is an art cultivated over the years. I like to think that the Brahmins I have descended from are adept at gastronomic marathons over the centuries of feasts and ceremonial dinners.
We have hosted many close friends, relatives and acquaintances over the years. For me, growing up in a large family, it was the most natural thing to invite people over for a stay and enjoy their company and share our shelter and food with them. We have had good guests and great guests and even a few not so good ones. The lesson we learned is calibrating our expectations and setting guests expectations based on the length of their stay. The frenetic visits to Washington DC, the eating out at fancy restaurants in Alexandria and Georgetown, the long drives to Mount Vernon and Monticello become untenable when repeated day after day for months with the same set of people. On the other hand, each new guest seeing the sights and doing the town for the first time brings back the same “first-time experience” we had when we came to this beautiful city and rekindles the sense of enthusiasm and excitement that keeps us living in this area 12 years later.
Looking after a friend’s child for a week is a wholly different matter from raising your children for the length of their childhood. Respect, discipline, setting up of structures and behavioral patterns, reinforcement of positive behaviors, trust, delegation patterns, and daily motivation are simply some of the things that are different when dealing with lifelong relationships.
As the US is embroiled in the occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are finding out that winning a war and staging successful occupation and transfer of regime while fending off insurrections is a different matter than raining bombs and bullets in a show of “shock and awe”.
All of this has a bearing on enterprise issues. The first question one must ask is whether an enterprise issue is a chronic issue or whether it has the possibility of an immediate solution, chronic issues must be dealt with differently. The expectation of instant solutions for chronic problems is different, knowing it is a chronic problem. Chronic problems are seldom solved in Toto. Refactoring or local improvements are used to effect long term improvement but there is seldom a time when the world returns back to perfect whole. Recognition that a problem is chronic must come to all stakeholders at the same time. If there is disagreement then there are different sets of expectations about the solution strategy that must be pursued.
In much the same way I think of one weekend guests, one week guests, one month guests and longer term co-residents, enterprise issues are probably categorizable into immediate, one week, one month, one quarter, one year or chronic issues. The difference is that neglected short term issues ultimately become chronic issues. And just as personal wellbeing in the midst of problems is based on the pursuit of effective habits, morale, discipline, order, tidiness and structure, enterprise well-being is also based on the pursuit of effective habits, morale, discipline, order, tidiness and structure.
Chronic issues in enterprises must be dealt with through re-factoring. For example, cleaning a large 15,000 square foot home is different from cleaning an 800 square foot apartment. Re-factoring is incremental improvement of the local without regard to a wholesale improvement of the whole. Re-factoring does not guarantee a perfect whole enterprise – it only ensures that parts of the enterprise are always improving.
Chronic issues involve moving two steps forward and one step back, sometimes. Chronic issues go through the entire lifecycle: denial, anger, sorrow, acceptance and finally reconstruction to the new reality.
When an enterprise has a portfolio of chronic issues that threaten its survival, it is time to “start a forest fire” and renew the enterprise from a new fresh start.
I have been a diabetic for more than twenty years and have found that treatment of a chronic illness must take a different course from the management of short illnesses. There is usually no light at the end of the tunnel, and as the saying goes, if there is – it is the light of an oncoming train! Pleasure is taken a day at a time and payment is due sooner or later. One learns to live with the illness and all the constraints it imposes on food habits and the delay of instant gratification. Managing chronic disease is a process of first undergoing the classical stages – neglect, denial, anger, hope and then finally, blessed acceptance and the peace that it brings.
At a unlimited food buffet, one learns to pace oneself while eating. As a good friend remarked, the difference between a buffet and a dinner is the difference between a marathon and a sprint. The initial laps are slow, almost languorous, and the finish is tiring but exhilarating. Eating at buffets is an art cultivated over the years. I like to think that the Brahmins I have descended from are adept at gastronomic marathons over the centuries of feasts and ceremonial dinners.
We have hosted many close friends, relatives and acquaintances over the years. For me, growing up in a large family, it was the most natural thing to invite people over for a stay and enjoy their company and share our shelter and food with them. We have had good guests and great guests and even a few not so good ones. The lesson we learned is calibrating our expectations and setting guests expectations based on the length of their stay. The frenetic visits to Washington DC, the eating out at fancy restaurants in Alexandria and Georgetown, the long drives to Mount Vernon and Monticello become untenable when repeated day after day for months with the same set of people. On the other hand, each new guest seeing the sights and doing the town for the first time brings back the same “first-time experience” we had when we came to this beautiful city and rekindles the sense of enthusiasm and excitement that keeps us living in this area 12 years later.
Looking after a friend’s child for a week is a wholly different matter from raising your children for the length of their childhood. Respect, discipline, setting up of structures and behavioral patterns, reinforcement of positive behaviors, trust, delegation patterns, and daily motivation are simply some of the things that are different when dealing with lifelong relationships.
As the US is embroiled in the occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are finding out that winning a war and staging successful occupation and transfer of regime while fending off insurrections is a different matter than raining bombs and bullets in a show of “shock and awe”.
All of this has a bearing on enterprise issues. The first question one must ask is whether an enterprise issue is a chronic issue or whether it has the possibility of an immediate solution, chronic issues must be dealt with differently. The expectation of instant solutions for chronic problems is different, knowing it is a chronic problem. Chronic problems are seldom solved in Toto. Refactoring or local improvements are used to effect long term improvement but there is seldom a time when the world returns back to perfect whole. Recognition that a problem is chronic must come to all stakeholders at the same time. If there is disagreement then there are different sets of expectations about the solution strategy that must be pursued.
In much the same way I think of one weekend guests, one week guests, one month guests and longer term co-residents, enterprise issues are probably categorizable into immediate, one week, one month, one quarter, one year or chronic issues. The difference is that neglected short term issues ultimately become chronic issues. And just as personal wellbeing in the midst of problems is based on the pursuit of effective habits, morale, discipline, order, tidiness and structure, enterprise well-being is also based on the pursuit of effective habits, morale, discipline, order, tidiness and structure.
Chronic issues in enterprises must be dealt with through re-factoring. For example, cleaning a large 15,000 square foot home is different from cleaning an 800 square foot apartment. Re-factoring is incremental improvement of the local without regard to a wholesale improvement of the whole. Re-factoring does not guarantee a perfect whole enterprise – it only ensures that parts of the enterprise are always improving.
Chronic issues involve moving two steps forward and one step back, sometimes. Chronic issues go through the entire lifecycle: denial, anger, sorrow, acceptance and finally reconstruction to the new reality.
When an enterprise has a portfolio of chronic issues that threaten its survival, it is time to “start a forest fire” and renew the enterprise from a new fresh start.
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