Management by Crisis

Management by crisis is the idea of addressing a problem only when it becomes a crisis. Typical symptoms in the IT industry include:

• You keep getting crisis all the time (most obvious one)
• Everyday is like trench warfare - answering stink mails, having icy conference calls with customers, having meetings to decide on strategies before calls, etc

• Everyone works hard all the time and yet the customer is not happy
• A bomb greets you everyday in office. While leaving you get the satisfaction of difusing it. Next day there is another one to greet you

• projects seem to be 
  perennially in  critical stage

• Wrong people get appreciated
• People who handle escalations smoothly get appreciated, but,the ones who ensure escalations never come up in the first place get ignored

• Schedules go for a toss because of "urgent" issues
• Classic example : Initial plan of monthly movement to production gets replaced by daily production patches to fix "critical" bugs

Somethings leadership lessons to learn from IPL 3

• The end does not justify the means
• Great brand, more crowd & interest, more money. Everyone was happy except for the people who cared about the way it was done.

• You can only make a limited number of enemies
• Try to make partnerships and grow rather than bulldozing
• Don't take anybody for granted - everyone has a value and a nuisance value

• "Knowing people" will not bail you out when you screw-up

• Failure is always an orphan and instead of parents, it has a fall guy

• Being patient and sitting quiet to fight another day is most times better than going down all guns blazing
• Shashi Tharoor's response Vs Lalit Modi's response