Strategy, Finance, and Innovation

What is Strategy?
Strategy is a set of action points and plans to maximise returns. It is important to plan to know what is the most profitable way and how it will be achieved.

What is Finance?
Finance is about management of money and assets and provision of funds to meet requirements and needs. It is important to know finance to be able to procure and manage money.

What is innovation?
Innovation is about improvisiong around constraints that are produced by both strategy and finance. It is important to be able to think new solutions because that is where the money is.

What is marketing?
Marketing is about creating perception of the stuff and communicating the value.

Feedback and Conflict are 2 separate things

Attended a training on giving and receiving feedback at the office today. It turned out to be a learning experience mostly because of the role plays that were part of every takeaway. Role play allowed a customised experience of the training as candidates used their own experiences to take the session in the direction they wanted individually.

The one really good thing that I realised is that there is a subtle difference between a disagreement and a feedback for a job. Often confused, and as a result both of them are handled badly.

What is feedback?

It can be positive or negative. Positive feedback lifts morale. Negative feedback is given to lift (improve) performance. Job could be related to your subordinates, peers and managers.

Both the feedbacks need to be timely (regular/instantly), based on specific instances (not attitudes and personal), and aim to add value to the person (concrete).

Negative feedback is a about a job done wrong and its poor handling leads to conflict. It has 2 basic components: a) you have facts that show that a job is not getting done properly b) you add value to the person by giving out steps for improvement and prepare a plan for follow up.

What is conflict?

It arises from disagreement over a proposed plan or activity. The important point is that you do not have the facts about the job going bad. You only perceive it to go bad. It is the perception that differs. However, you do need to have an alternate plan to propose that meets both ends.

Handling them

Handling negative feedback has four important skills

if receiver is unmotivated – contraction

if receiver is uncommitted – set personal goal in conjuction with corporate goals and consequences of not meeting the corporate as well as personal goals

if receiver disagrees – about the facts provide evidence.

– about the problem show consequences of non-action

if receiver gets emotional, shocked or cries – give permission, give space, empathise, sort it out but do not stop.

The art is how to not to sound complaining.

I am still not clear about how to handle the conflicts.