Rohit Prabhakar

I build agentic revenue systems for Fortune 50 companies

How a 1:00 AM Mistake Taught Me Everything About Leadership & Culture of Innovation

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In my first three years on the job, I worked on web applications. One night around 1:00 AM in India, we were giving a live demo to our biggest client in the US.

Everything was fine until a small data issue came up. We told the client we needed a five-minute break, left the call, and my tech lead asked me to refresh the folder and rebuild the project quickly.

I was nervous and rushed. Instead of rebuilding, I accidentally ran an rm -f command on the main project folder.

The whole project was gone. Back then, there was no GitHub to simply pull the code again. I had deleted everything right in front of my CEO, with our biggest client waiting on the call.

I thought I would be yelled at or even fired on the spot. But that’s not what happened.

My CEO stayed calm and simply asked, “What can we do to recover?” He didn’t blame me or make me feel worse. We found a backup on a CD, restored the project, and ten minutes later, we were back on the call. The demo ended well.

At 3:00 AM, before leaving the office, I went to the CEO’s room to apologize. I felt ashamed. He looked at me and said, “It is OK, just don’t do such a mistake again.”

That moment changed my career.

Because he didn’t yell or single me out, he gave me what people now call “psychological safety.” I was no longer afraid to try new things. That safety helped me move from tech into business and keep innovating. Surprisingly, no one of my team and especially my tech lead yelled at me too or got angry. We are still friends and they still make fun  of me :). That was the team’s culture, and I always try to create the same for my teams.

Since then, I’ve used the same approach with my own teams. I don’t yell or look for someone to blame when things go wrong. Because of this, my teams are some of the most innovative and resilient I’ve seen. They work together because they know I support them, even if they make a “1:00 AM mistake.”

If you want your team to be bold, you need to let them fail without fear. At the same time, forgiveness is not about not expecting accountability. I clearly heard in that message from my CEO that don’t do it again. If someone repeats the same mistake or makes a critical error without learning, I make sure to have an honest conversation with them about what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future.

Why Strategies fail in Corporate World

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No doubt  strategic thinking has a great importance for the overall growth of the organization. As very well said “Men without vision shall perish” which holds so true about every organization too. Having a strategic thinking that maps to the vision is an absolute necessity. I don’t think if a company or group can ever succeed if it lacks either the vision or a strategy.
I have read and observed that many times companies and divisions that have all the required strategy but still fail. They have an executive team which churns our great strategies  but still they fail. In my personal experience  the disconnect between thinking and execution is the key reason. What was thought was not relayed well and executed in accordance to the strategy at all.
Many times I have seen the executives having a thought process that thinking is their game. Once they are done just throw the strategy map to the lower management. Let the lower management have a plan to execute on the strategy.
Now comes the turn of the lower management and they start executing. Many projects are brought to life and many changed based on their limited understanding. Priorities are assigned to all the projects again based on their interpretation of the  strategy  map.  Not just the wrong interpretation of strategy but also other factors like their own technology priorities, sale priorities, client priorities, priorities of the respective group etc.

Nothing wrong with this except that there comes a disconnect! Strategy makers do not understand how the projects in execution fulfill the strategy and match to the vision of the company while the execution teams keeps on spending huge amount of effort on projects that are not aligned strategically to the vision of the company. A huge amount of resources are wasted on strategy and execution in this manner.

I know nobody is trying to do it with an intent to go on a wrong path but still it happens every time very year. Just in USA,  companies spend billions of dollars on training the top level management about the best strategies etc. But every year less than 20% strategies are successfully put to implementation.
How to fix this issue? Any thoughts?Any comments?

Risk vs Issue

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Risk vs Issue is something that confuses us more than anything else in Project Management. I have myself always been confused about the difference between Risk and Issue. I always understood it as Issue is an event and Risk is the Consequence. I believe that most of us in the profession also think the same way. So I am not wrong…until I read the definition in PMBOK.

 

 

How is Corporate using Social Media

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  • 94% of Corporates use social media in some capacity.
  • 75% saw an increase in website traffic.
  • 58% use it for Lead Generation
  • Favorite social sites are Facebook (92%), Twitter (82%), LinkedIn (73%) and blogs (61%).
  • 58% of Fortune 500 companies had Facebook pages in 2011, 62% had Twitter accounts.

All the details and infographic are available at  MBA Programs

Social Media is Going Corporate
Courtesy of: MBAPrograms.org

CIO Role in Big Data

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Today I came across an awesome post by McKinsey on how CIO should play a vital role in the Big Data for their company as CIO have the influence and credibility to run such projects.

To help companies raise their game on how they use data and analytics for competitive advantage, CIOs should master four critical roles:

  • as venture capitalist, showcasing the “art of the possible” to internal customers by highlighting the most promising ideas to apply big data and advanced analytics

  • as product manager, assembling easy-to-use big data and advanced analytics “products” designed to match patterns of use by internal customers

  • as recruiter, motivating and retaining the best talent

  • as business leader, building the discipline to enable transformational change and impact at scale

In this article, McKinsey describe some of the steps CIOs are taking in each of these areas and offer insights from the chief executives of information at AIG and Merck.

LEADING UP

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When we are debating an issue, loyalty means giving me your honest opinion, whether you think I’ll like it or not. Disagreement, at this stage, stimulates me. But once a decision has been made, the debate ends. From that point on, loyalty means executing the decision as if it were your own.”

~ General Colin Powell

“Very few big executives want to be surrounded by ‘yes’ men. Their greatest weakness often is the fact that ‘yes’ men build up around the executive a wall of fiction, when what the executive wants most of all is plain facts.”

~ Burton Bigelow

Source: John Maxwell leadership wire