Young people regardless of educational stream
are restless to discover the elixir of professional growth. Each educational
stream by virtue of the unique nature of its domain imbues in its students
certain unique capabilities. Literature, for example, provides its students
with an ability to appreciate the dynamics of humans and nature. Commerce makes
its students aware of the worth of trade and business. Accounting makes
students proficient in deployment and measurement of assets and liabilities.
Science makes its students create the bridge between the natural and synthetic;
the organic and inorganic. Engineering teaches its students the ability to
convert ideas into gadgets; the abstract into real. In a similar manner, each
professional course that has a technical characteristic of its own provides
unique characteristics to the students.
Doubtless, these professional courses help individuals
enter the organizations and functions of their choice and grow in their careers
based on further professional specialization or diversification. It is not,
however, so well established that educational excellence by itself provides the
motive force for managerial and leadership development. A simplistic, and
popular, view is that if technical capabilities as embedded through
professional courses are reinforced with soft skills such as communication,
inter-personal and other behavioral skills, it would help individuals achieve
higher goals through superior performance. While a combination of such hard
skills and soft skills is undoubtedly very much needed, there is a more
fundamental skill-set that enables truly superior competitive performance. This
blog post proposes a model, which is described through an acronym called CATCH,
that represents a combination of Conceptual, Analytical, Technical, Creative
and Holistic capabilities.
Conceptual
Simplistically, conceptual skills are
ideation or imagination skills. In a managerial sense, they represent skills
that help an individual crystallize complex and abstract problems in terms of
core themes and ideas. One of the fascinating conceptual analyses was displayed
by Air Asia. When asked why Air Asia was trying to enter India when there were
already so many low cost airliners, mostly suffering losses, pat came reply
from the CEO, Mittu Chandilya who questioned if they were low cost airliners or
low fare airliners. The conceptual clarity teaches us that fundamentally the
firm has to be a low cost operation whereupon it can automatically be a real
low fare firm, if it chooses to. Another marvelous conceptualization was
telling the IIT professors struggling to dissect the cultural pros and cons of
having a management school within IIT that it would be like having a mini-IIM
in IIT campus.
Conceptual thinking enables a leader or
manager to understand core opportunities and challenges facing a business; it
cuts out clutter. It helps managers and leaders avoid distractions. Conceptual
thinking is particularly helpful when firms are either in startup or end-state
phase of business or when they are faced with strategic crossroads. The
uncertainty of future options and unpredictability of data points are managed
by conceptual definition of the core problems. A firm which has a product lead
time of five years and was paralyzed from investments for five years can be
conceptually concluded to have lost a decade of life and several decades of
competitive advantage, even without any data analysis. Equally, such a company
can be conceptually held to be capable of reentering the competitive game with
only a clever acquisition. Conceptual thinking simplifies the otherwise complex
business life.
Analytical
Analytical skills are those that enable an
individual use a logical method of thinking about anything in order to
understand it, especially by looking at all the constituent parts separately.
It typically deploys scientific and research based approaches. The link between
conceptual and analytical is simple; the analytical part can take off optimally
once the conceptual part is clear. Taking the AirAsia example, once conceptual clarity is established that
low-cost rather than low-fare is the right model, analytics would need to focus on how the lowest cost of operation
could be achieved. This would involve analyzing every component of cost for
frugality and every component of customer service for value-optimality. The
more comprehensive the analysis is the better would be the operating model.
That said, analytics without conceptual crystallization would be a wild goose
chase.
Analysis provides choices and generates data
points that could help managements make appropriate decisions. Conceptual
clarity would continue to help in making analysis better. For example, layering
of additional fares on base fare cannot be good analytics; so is the case with
the complex dynamic fare model. The model develops in an opaque manner a high
average fare for the airliner, leveraging the seductive promotional advance
fares and exploitative usurious last day fares but would not be in keeping with
the concept of a true low cost airliner which is expected to provide maximal
perceived service with minimal absorbed cost. Analytics requires sound business
background; analysts should understand the vital-essential-desirable as well as
the fundamental-core-peripheral concepts as appropriate to the industry or the
business one is in. Analysts should also appreciate where what tools would be
relevant; operations research, for example, would be applicable for route
planning while game theory could be relevant for competitor analysis and simple
arithmetic appropriate for standard costing.
Technical
Although considered allied to, or reflective
of, engineering and technology, technical skills have a broader connotation as
well. Any skill required to efficiently and effectively perform a job is a
technical skill. Technical skill typically grows out of the knowledge of a
subject and is the fundamental core to be in a domain or lead it. Every
business requires a number of technical skills; what is core technical for one
industry could be enabler for another industry. For example, for an automobile
firm, manufacturing technology could be core while finance and IT could be
supportive technical ones. For a banking firm, finance and IT could be core
while civil engineering could be supportive. Regardless of such
differentiation, technically one must be a master of expertise in one’s domain.
Companies such as GE and Unilever focus on multi-functional expertise to build
themselves into firms with sustainable competitive advantage.
Technical skills are acquired through serious
curricular efforts, proactive extracurricular reading and intense on-the-job
deployment and learning. Technical skills are reinforced by continuous
learning; it is more than a simple learning curve effect. A doctor or surgeon
continuously adds to his or her medical skills through each case he or she
handles. A maintenance engineer continuously adds to his preventive maintenance
capability with every breakdown maintenance case he or she handles. A product
designer continuously improves his or her products by observation of customer
usage and integration of material and other technologies. An accountant
understands the power of numbers and their implications by continuously
monitoring global accounting regulations and trends for generally accepted
accounting practices of different countries, and related case laws. Being
constantly studious is the only way to acquire and enhance technical
skills.
Creative
Creative skill involves the use of skill and
the imagination to produce a new work in any domain, be it work of art, science
or engineering. Many experts consider that creativity and originality are even
more important than technical skill. If an airliner can creatively transport
its employees seamlessly across the nation through a hub and spoke strategy it
would provide competitive differentiation. If a full fare airliner can provide
a mobile online air ticket reservation and purchase facility with anytime
access without dynamic fares it could nurture for itself a creative niche. If
an airliner can replace its in-flight print magazine by a digital version
displayed on individual screens it could not only reduce costs but can also
provide a whole archive of magazines to information lovers. If ground handling
is improved to reduce vehicle turnaround by 50 percent, an airline could add
one additional flight to its daily schedule. By opening its own dedicated
takeaway food kiosk in the departure terminal, an airliner can save on crimped
up and inadequate service on its flights, more particularly the short haul
ones. Creativity differentiates the winners from the losers, more so the
sustainable growth firms from the also-rans.
Creativity requires an independent and
questioning mind that constantly seeks improvements at one level and
out-of-the-box thinking at another level. Creative skill comes with constant
observation but each time with a fresh enquiring eye. Creativity also comes
with finding new ways of solving difficult problems or fulfilling customer
needs in better manner. The process of technological development is based on
creativity. Creativity can come from knowledge or from practice. The former should
lead one to find better ways from knowledge. The latter should lead to a quest
for knowledge that can improve practice. Many times, small but focused
experiments become scalable for global impact. A creative payment gateway, for
example, can revolutionize global online commerce. A creative patient record
management system can revolutionize national healthcare registry, as another
example. Successful startups develop from creative operational or business
solutions.
Holistic
Holistic skill is the ability to consider a
whole thing or being to be more than a collection of parts. Holistic life and holistic medicine are
examples of common phraseologies of holism. Holism is the philosophical
approach that the whole, of anything, must be considered in order to understand
its different parts. Holism is one of the most complex capability to possess
because it is a multidimensional attribute; covering all direct and indirect
influencers and current and future evolutions. Reverting to the AirAsia
example, the business plan of AirAsia involving important parameters such as
fleet mix, route network, schedule density and several other factors are
dependent on the nature of airport infrastructure in various cities and towns.
It would be segmented thinking to buy a large capacity aircraft and also hope
to connect all the tier 2 and tier 3 cities; it would not work as a holistic
strategy because the short runways would not accept such larger aircraft. It
would be somewhat like an international airliner like Lufthansa planning to
convert its entire fleet to A 380 (the largest plane) even though only few
global cities can accommodate such wide-bodied plane.
Holism requires thinking and imagining beyond
the obvious, connecting the visible and invisible dots of industry boundary,
industry value map and inflection points in regulatory evolution. This is not
necessarily the forte of the wise elderly or apex leaders; all individuals who
can process multiple sets of data and information and form patterns can develop
a holistic approach to what they seek to accomplish. Holism is a temporally integrative capability as well; involving an ability to connect the certain past, volatile present and uncertain future to achieve a holistic solution. It merges emotion with objectivity as well as experience with anticipation to create a new paradigm that others less endowed would find it difficult to mimic. Holism requires that the
four skills discussed earlier, namely conceptual, analytical, technical and
creative are well developed in an individual. Holism in such individuals acts
as a capstan capability.
The catch
If these constitute the five virtuous
capabilities for personality, knowledge and leadership development, it must be intriguing that such programs
emphasize only some of the capabilities; analytical and technical ones are the
most emphasized. The reason lies in the belief that while analytical and
technical skills can be “taught and acquired”, the other three skills are
dependent on how the brain is hardwired with respect to conceptualization,
creativity and holism. This could be a catch in adopting the CATCH development
model on a wider scale; but the catch is more imaginary than real! As with many
developmental activities, introspection, on the part of the developer and the
developing (the mentor and the mentee, the guru and sishya, the boss and the subordinate,
the teacher and the student, the leader and the follower, as the case may be).
Fundamentally, the developer should be a CATCH personality to develop the
individuals, and needless to add, even the developers would need to develop
themselves to make the CATCH development template work.
Posted by Dr CB Rao on June 29 2014.
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