Key to success lies in Management

Most of us work hard in our respective area, but only a few get what they want. Working hard is just not enough. Why? Bad management to be sure. How one manages – particularly one’s life – is at the root of one’s success or failure.

One more thing. It is not intelligence alone that can lead one steadily to one’s goals. A person who mismanages his intelligence is left. Out to repent as a failure whereas one who is an average person, but makes the best use of his managerial skills gets to the goal post the quickest.

It is in this context that I read an interesting book, management by Walking by Dr. A K Agarwal, a ceo of a firm. The author, to give just one aspect of managerial qualities, stresses on grooming your mind to take the right kind to take the right kind of decisions. He quotes Mahatma Gandhi, “it is wise to be too sure of one’s wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err”

One must, says the author deliberate hard on the choice available. Once a decision is taken, and when you mentally shift gears from deliberation to implementation, from contemplation to action it changes more than just the way one sees the decision at hand. While mapping out the plan for implementation, you feel more confident and more invincible about yourself in general. That is because implementation is a cue for the brain to focus on how to get the job done and to tune out the self-doubts and vulnerability inhabiting action.

At this stage, it is important that one must be fully confident that one can do and will do the task undertaken. One way, the author says, is to mind what Earl Gray Stevens had said, Confidence, like art, never comes from giving all the answers, it comes from being open to all the questions”. In other words, a confident person has an open mind and sees possibilities of a better outcome in every cue.