On the Edge!

What I have dared to list out here is about those small signs that hint you of a failure just before the major ones of revenues dropping or market share reducing actually show up. I was able to dig deep and find these obvious symptoms.

1. Most of your important & talented employees are leaving or already have left, though they don’t share the same  reasons for leaving you. If these employees are the key to your organization, if they were the pillars then its obvious that moving ahead you will  see the value of their function declining. The level at which these people are moving out will tell you the factor at which that function might go down by. The higher the level, the more you decline will see in terms of revenues.
2. A screwed up hierarchy structure. Its understood that if your key people are leaving, the hierarchy gets messed up. Ensure you have the right people to replace them just in time to minimize the loss. Care should be taken, that the balance in the structure is maintained and that there are enough people to work. The ratios  between employees and managers need to be taken care of, and this is primary else people at the bottom will also start to move out because of pressure.
3. When you are promoting people for all the wrong reasons. The worst thing that you can do to an organization is to give the wrong person the job you have. Just because a trusted key employee leaves, don’t find another employee who is just trustworthy to replace him. Do so if and only if he has the skills to take up the job at hand immediately. If he has skills that needs 6 months of grooming, promote him when he is fit to take up the responsibilities (six months is a big time,you can go bankrupt by then).
4. When you have more meetings than you have time for acting upon your decisions made in those meetings. This one is a clear symptom isn’t it. Running around meetings, the entire day planning to firefight makes no sense until you implement them. So make sure you act on your decisions and then review them.

What do you think are the signs that companies can use to identify and save themselves from a decline? Do you have something to add up to this list or against this list. Just drop in a Line. We will discuss them here for the world.

Life moves on whether your live it or not. Its almost over a 100 days since I’ve posted some thing on this blog or any blog for that matter. Things have changed dramatically over these days and I feel I just have a small chance before things go even worse.  These are the days when things are not right everywhere especially when there is an economic slowdown everywhere. There’s a lot of Negativity in the air that keeps me worried. This is a pretty important time in my career, where I have made some bold decisions at this point of time and I  just have a few more days to prove that the decisions I have made were worthy ones for my career. To be precise I live on an edge. Oh I forgot I’ve changed the title of my blog to On the Edge! not because I live on the edge at the moment but because we all live on the Edge!

These are days when I seek motivation. Something that came as gift to motivate me, via google reader was this video which Gaurav Mishra tagged in an inspirational Post a few days ago.  I didn’t want to miss this video hence I’ve tagged it to my blog as well ( I thought U would be lazy to head over to Gaurav’s post and watch the video, I would still recommend  U to read his post)

Steve Jobs has always been an inspiration for me especially for an apple fan like me. He simply amazes me this time as well. Incase you haven’t watched this video yet, I bet its definitely worth 15 minutes of your life. Let me know if you have something inspirational to share.