Reacting to the 6th Sense

The challenge confronted by a business manager is to ensure ALL the teams are focussed on the KPIs as much as you yourself are. Easier said than done! As someone rightly said, "Most problems in business have 2 legs", the business manager needs to respond fast to any 6th Sense signals. I personally feel that the success depends on the quality of response the business manager makes to every signal that indicates a potential problem in the team's focus. You can't take a chance at all! While I am not saying that one should become the pessimistic, control-freak leader, I am only stressing the need to keep your wits about and do spot checks. Try not to leave anything to chance as a stitch in time could save nine.

Ab Khud Kuch Karna Paray Ga!

I see faaaaaaar too many people living meaningless lives, and eventually withering into oblivion. As a result of this inaction, there are seemingly no rewards for them after death and they certainly haven't got much to enjoy in this life too.

Instead of cribbing and crying about the above, I want to change this current state of affair!

I want to ensure that humans get the maximum in the herafter and also the best in this world. I would urge you to do the same too. Let's make our lives count and leave an impact that would ensure accomplishment of the above-mentioned vision.

You are all quite successful in your own fields. People look up to you. I would like you to consider writing a line, a paragraph, a page, an article, anything you can contribute easily to help people learn from your wealth of information, and as a result of their access to you, add value to their lives.

Let's help them in Winning this challenge called Life! 

InshaAllah, "Winning" would become a Counselling, Consultancy & Training platform which would leverage professionals like you. The idea is to help people with problems get connected with a relevant person who has managed to get out of a similar situation earlier.  For example, I am currently working with some professors of LUMS in drafting a research paper on lives of top 100 investors, professionals and entreprenuers of the country who weren't born with a silver spoon in their mouths, and yet have managed to reach the top of their fields. You could consider either becoming one of those whom we would interview, or help us identify and get connected with others whom you think can add value to this project.

Similarly, you can just contribute on this blog by writing articles about success in your field, for instance. Or it could be any FAQ that you usually answer, and you think I should post on this platform. For example, my friends from Islamic Finance industry can most certainly help by giving material that can answer multiple questions that people have to ask.

Or if you feel there is some other thing that can be done, feel free to share and we will see how to make that a reality. In short, let's do something......

So, if you are interested to extend your hand in any way, just comment on this blog, or email me on ahsanoni@gmail.com and we will see how we can take the proposition further.

Ab Khud Kuch Karna Paray Ga!

Winning the Pizza War In Pakistan

"Why did you close down your Boat Basin branch?", asked one of my audience after I completed my speech on Winning the War of Brands.

Apparently, there were 2 thoughts behind this query:
A. Was the decision a result of a need to stop bleeding as a brand?
B. Was it caused by a shift in consumer behavior?

The actual was of course far from both.

Boat Basin had been our flagship store for quite some time and had laid the base for much of our expansion throughout the country. Such was the association that customers had that although we recently replaced that store with 3 new options closer to their homes, they still wanted to keep coming back to the original.

Memories!!! Sigh......

The Boat Basin Pizza Hut had been designed by the best architect and interior designer, Mr. Shahid Abdulla, and everything else, from menus to people, had been carefully crafted to give a unique experience to the customers. That care is what defined everything that flowed out later and it seemed to have left such an effect that customers still rue the fact that there is no longer that branch for them to go to.

Sadly, the entire retail industry in Pakistan hasn't matured enough to realize how important these initial efforts are. In their quest to make quick money, they fail to "invest" long and hard enough to make it count. Interestingly, that's what makes the eventual difference. Pizza Hut is a huge brand in Pakistan and is inshaAllah destined to remain so for years, but then there are these myriad retail concepts that never get to establish themselves beyond being just-another-neighborhood store.

This, in my opinion, is one of reasons why many retail businesses in Pakistan can never hope to "make it large". I just hope they can have this paradigm shift and think beyond just making their kitchen run in the short run.

Confessions of a Traditional Schooler

I have been wondering. Is unschooling only for children? Read some of my thoughts below. Sorry about the length. I have never been very good at being concise. J

Part 1: Life of a traditional schooler

1977: Born on 2^nd November

1983: Class 1. Amongst the top 3 performers in the class.

1992: Class 9. Amongst the top sportsmen in the class.

1994: O Levels: 6 As out of 7 subjects

1996: A Levels: 2As plus admission in IBA (Institute of Business Administration)

2000: MBA from IBA. 3.5 GPA

Having achieved pretty decent things in a schooling life of 17 years, and having made my elders and self proud by getting reasonable distinction out of the crowd, I was “above-average”. Having sought inspiration from the financial successes of my family’s elders & entrepreneurs (most of whom were dead when I turned 4), I wanted to be an entrepreneur too.

2005: After a 4 years stint in the corporate world, and after having the pleasures of working with some of the top names of Advertising (Interflow), Islamic Banking (Meezan), Conventional Banking (Citibank), I laid the foundation of my business……………..

And failed miserably! …………nearly 4 million rupees down the drain………and a mountain of debt on my head. Oops, what went wrong?

2008: Time to seek answers……..let’s be the Sherlock Homes…….however, this time, let me not do something that I learnt in schools which was to seek the easy way out and ask some “specialist” for answers. I will do my own research. I will find out about successful people through reading.

Reading? Are you nuts, Ahsan? The only time you read was two nights before the exams, and that too was “intelligent textual scan”. Look at the GRADES you got. There is no correlation between your “success” (measured by grades) and reading. So, forget reading. Do what you were taught in school. Visit an expert. He will do some diagnostics on you, and give you some quick-fixes and you should be back on track.

2009: Fortunately, I did not visit the doctor, and spent hours doing something I never did before. I read one book on the Google’s Founders, The Google Story. (Hmmm! That was fun!) I followed that one with a book on Wal Mart. (Interesting!!) Next, Good to Great by Jim Collins. (Wow!!) Seven Habits of Highly Effective People…………..and recently, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki……….I am reading Winning by Jack Welch now, and am planning to study Technical & Fundamental Analysis techniques for Investing, and Vision Development Techniques & Time Management Techniques etc etc

Hello??????????????????

17 years of expensive education!!! Firstly under the amazing O & A Levels system of UK, and then 4 Years with one of the top universities in Asia, and you don’t know how to manage time, finances & people?  Mr. Ahsan, that is pretty basic stuff that you have missed……and what was it that you were saying about yourself? You felt you were above-average, right?

One last question, sir. Your schooling system must have taught you to direct your life to some worthwhile vision. So what is your vision, Mr. Ahsan? Mr. Ahsan…….Mr. Ahsan? (He’s lying on the floor, stone-dead)

June 10, 2009: Mr. Ahsan, the above-average product of the schooling system, the self-proclaimed genius, passed away under serious depression that his 31 years have been absolutely directionless.

Part 2: Confessions of the Traditional Schooler

A few minutes ago, my wife coerced me to hear an article on the drawbacks of traditional schooling and while she was reading it, my mind drifted towards the questions I have been battling to answer. A lot of these books that I have read recently have been amongst the best sellers, and are easily available if you were to visit any bookstore in Karachi. Not only did this literature help me identify my deficiencies, and the loop-holes in my overall strategy, they have given me access to incredible tools that I intend to apply in my personal and professional life from here on. I may have lost money, and am in a fair bit of financial duress too, but I learnt that I am not the first one to be in this mess. Almost all successful people have benefited from their good & bad judgments and as someone aptly stated:

“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment”.

While I find consolation in the words and text of the books that I read, I still struggle to understand why the schooling system that I have been associated with failed to share this important and basic information? While I may crib and cry about this thing happening to me in Pakistan, it is a sad reality that even in the strong economies like the US, the educational system fails to teach students the basics of “financial literacy”. For weeks, I have been thinking about all this, and whoops, my wife reads this article (fjkjfkdjkf) to me, and it all dawns to me that this inadequate transfer of right amount of knowledge to the masses is not due to bad luck! It is most clearly because of the deliberate design of the current educational system that aims at churning out masses that are capable only to do basic, manual, clerical and repetitive tasks.

So if you are trying to be different from the herd, and are targeting being more productive than the brother-clones that were “educated”: along with you, you need access to a totally different curriculum. While the traditional schooling system has managed to keep that information out of the reach of their students, the natural process of learning, the unschooling or the homeschooling is alhamdolillah still there.

What I went through between 2005 and 2009 was an unintentional process of unschooling, and it was the financial failure that got me to “unschool” myself. Through a true accident, I came to this painful realization that unschooling is essential for all of us, and at all ages. My schooling made me think that I know everything, but the more I read independently, the more I got to know that I knew not.

While I am happy that my unschooling has started, and I am also happy that the homeschooling efforts being made by this group would help produce better individuals from grass root levels, I am still very worried about the rest of my herd. Not only do their children need homeschooling, they too need to go through a process of unschooling.  

My wife is probably reading this mail too and thanking Allah that I have become the “convert” in favor of homeschooling. Well, I have become a lot more than that. I’m planning to work on hardcore traditional schoolers like myself.