The Anexas Story - Chapter 22: TGIF

Thanks for showing so much love to my book – The Anexas Story. Based on many requests to publish chapters of the book on LinkedIn, I continue to write a series of articles based on these chapters. Please read on and keep believing that there is an entrepreneur in you…and everyone! 

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Thank God It’s Friday. I don’t eat at the restaurant of the same name but I like the name.

We turned this into a slogan at Anexas! To create the coherence the team needed in the wake of expanding horizons. You look out of the window, and you see no sign of wind or even rain anywhere. Now if your TV news warns you of a cyclone in the city exactly six hours from now, what would you do? Especially, when this information is given by the meteorological department coming with a warning from the local civic body? You would believe them, expect the cyclone, and act accordingly, maybe, even leave the city! This is because you know they have better information, more data, and accurate satellite pictures to predict the cyclone.

The same is true for an organization. When the things are smooth, even though it appears to be business as usual, you need to keep your eyes and ears open to predict the cyclones. Why only organizations, this is true even in our everyday life, relationships, health, and wellness. You will always get signals and pointers, signifying the things to come. Like, in case of health, based on your present lifestyle and diagnostic reports, you can predict what problems you are likely to face in the future.

In your career, based on your efforts, the skills you learn and the place you are in, you can predict where you are headed to. And in your ventures, you can sense the forthcoming problems if you are alert enough to the surrounding environment. This alertness might be structured or unstructured, formal or informal. But it should be there.

A forewarned team is always forearmed. As we started spreading our wings, we also needed to be on the same page. We started global online meetings on Fridays which were attended by all the team members worldwide. Our Friday global calls became a way to measure the vital signs of the health of the business.

It became one platform where all the team members came together for forty-five minutes and started giving the status of the work being done or to be done, sharing important updates or thoughts and reaffirming the commitment of achieving the monthly goals with a slogan, “Together we will achieve x-hundred thousand dollars this month.” We actually started shouting it out together! The magic in the unified voice of all the team members energized and motivated us to achieve tough targets we set for ourselves to delight our customers.

These Friday calls also sometimes acted as idea generation meetings for issues collectively faced by us. Some problems could be solved by collective brainstorming because solutions produced by the team were always stronger than those produced by individuals. Why? Because, most of us are poor critics of our own thinking, you know!

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For subsequent articles, please watch this space.

You can buy the book directly from its website on https://www.anexasstory.com

or on Amazon on https://www.amazon.in/ANEXAS-STORY-There-Entrepreneur-Everyone-ebook/dp/B07ZGLN8C7

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Amitabh Saxena is founder of Anexas, a well-known lean six sigma and project management consulting organisation. He has trained over 50,000 participants and has 30 years of experience in consulting more than 300 organisations around the world including Fortune 100 companies across industry domains. With a strong team of 25 Master Black Belts, his organisation Anexas has been helping individuals and organisations achieve eminence through excellence since 2006. They can be reached on enquiry@anexas.net.